Recently in Presidents Category

Ezra Klein discusses how different our present political power structure is from the intentions of the framers of our Constitution.

There was, of course, a reason why Congress and the legislative branch is outlined in Article I of the Constitution. While we have three co-equal branches, the legislative branch was to be the first among equals. Within the Congress, moreover, the House of Representatives was supposed to be more prominent than the Senate overall.

Of course, that is not the present situation, as Klein explains:

But that hierarchy has been tossed on its head. For all practical purposes, the House is less powerful than the modern Senate and Congress has taken a back seat to the president. The reasons for the preeminence of the president are complicated, but a big reason that the Senate has stepped to the forefront of modern politics is that it's less democratic than the House, and thus most attention focuses on whether it can pass legislation, and most compromises focus on helping it pass legislation. That's unavoidable given the filibuster's centrality to the system, but it's not a good state of affairs, and it is not how the Founders intended for things to go.

It is just one more reason for why we should work to eliminate the Senate filibuster.

Our friends the British have begun an investigation this week into their involvement into the Iraq War, one to which we should pay more close attention.

Glenn Greenwald, for example, reviews testimony yesterday that should remind us of how important the anthrax attacks which followed the September 11, 2001 attacks were to creating the climate of fear in the United States that fed into the Iraq invasion and so many other horrible policies. Yes, those same anthrax attacks so quickly deleted from our collective memory.

Yesterday, the former U.K. Ambassador to the U.S., Sir Christopher Meyer, testified as to the importance of the anthrax attacks, as Greenwald summarizes:

Meyer said attitudes towards Iraq were influenced to an extent not appreciated by him at the time by the anthrax scare in the US soon after 9/11. US senators and others were sent anthrax spores in the post, a crime that led to the death of five people, prompting policymakers to claim links to Saddam Hussein. . . .

On 9/11 Condoleezza Rice, then the US national security adviser, told Meyer she was in "no doubt: it was an al-Qaida operation" . . . It seemed that Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld's deputy, argued for retaliation to include Iraq, Meyer said. . . .

But the anthrax scare had "steamed up" policy makers in Bush's administration and helped swing attitudes against Saddam, who the administration believed had been the last person to use anthrax. (emphasis by Greenwald)

As Greenwald then reminds us, the anthrax attacks remain "unresolved and uninvestigated." How the hell is that acceptable given how important they were? He reviews, with links, all of the sources that have serious questions for about the FBI's conclusion to this case.

I simply do not understand how we have left the anthrax attacks unresolved and wiped from our collective memory. They directly impacted more people than the September 11 attacks. They created more fear. (To this day, how many of us get training on the proper way to open mail?)

Some things deserve more of our attention. That's why I encourage you to go read Greenwald's post and restart your memory by clicking on his post's links.

Funny how a Democratic President can remind all Members of Congress that they hold the power of the purse and do not have to accept an out-of-control executive branch. As CQ Politics David Nather reports after the House voted 429-2 to negate an Obama Administration signing statement:

Cut off the money? Congress can do that? Well, yes, that's one of the most basic oversight tools Congress has. It's just odd that no one remembered that during the years when President George W. Bush was burying the Hill in signing statements, and making far more sweeping claims of executive power than Obama has.

Ah, yes, this highlights another problem. Yes, it is hypocritical for Congressional Republicans to suddenly remember they have an oversight role in our Constitutional Republic. (Does one get a headache after such a sudden revelation?) But, for me, the bigger problem lies with the Obama Administration continuing to issue signing statements after all we experienced over the past eight years.

Better choices, please.

John Hodgman brings the funny. And, perhaps, another look at why some people are frustrated with a president who does not appear to govern as liberal as his rhetoric appears.

The Republican National Committee scrapes the bottom of the barrel in attacking President Obama for having a date night in New York City. As the Washington Monthly's Steve Benen writes:

First, the Obamas didn't take the usual Air Force One jet. It's a short flight, and the First Couple took a smaller plane (technically, any plane the president is on automatically becomes Air Force One, but the point is, the Obamas didn't take the Air Force One).

Second, by the RNC's reasoning, the Obamas would never be able to enjoy a nice evening out, since there's always something going on in the world. ("The president went to his daughter's soccer game in the midst of two wars? Outrageous!")

And third, isn't this whining unusually small-minded, even by RNC standards? The President took the First Lady on a date to NYC. They didn't even spend the night in the city. Is everything grounds for petty, partisan sniping?

Yes. When that's all you have left in the toolbag. Yes, it is.

Republicans against date nights. I look forward to seeing how that works out for them.

I agree with Digby, and thank Richard Clarke for pointing out that the trauma of September 11, 2001, is no excuse for bad decisions made by government leaders. As Clarke writes:

Yet listening to Cheney and Rice, it seems that they want to be excused for the measures they authorized after the attacks on the grounds that 9/11 was traumatic. "If you were there in a position of authority and watched Americans drop out of eighty-story buildings because these murderous tyrants went after innocent people," Rice said in her recent comments, "then you were determined to do anything that you could that was legal to prevent that from happening again."

I have little sympathy for this argument. Yes, we went for days with little sleep, and we all assumed that more attacks were coming. But the decisions that Bush officials made in the following months and years -- on Iraq, on detentions, on interrogations, on wiretapping -- were not appropriate. Careful analysis could have replaced the impulse to break all the rules, even more so because the Sept. 11 attacks, though horrifying, should not have surprised senior officials. Cheney's admission that 9/11 caused him to reassess the threats to the nation only underscores how, for months, top officials had ignored warnings from the CIA and the NSC staff that urgent action was needed to preempt a major al-Qaeda attack.

Thus, when Bush's inner circle first really came to grips with the threat of terrorism, they did so in a state of shock -- a bad state in which to develop a coherent response. Fearful of new attacks, they authorized the most extreme measures available, without assessing whether they were really a good idea.

I believe this zeal stemmed in part from concerns about the 2004 presidential election. Many in the White House feared that their inaction prior to the attacks would be publicly detailed before the next vote -- which is why they resisted the 9/11 commission -- and that a second attack would eliminate any chance of a second Bush term. So they decided to leave no doubt that they had done everything imaginable.

There should be no excusing this. Nor forgiving it. And as the evidence suggests, more investigations are in order.

We must come to terms with what happened if we hope to restore our national honor.

Jay Ackroyd links to John Cole's apt metaphor about the perils of focusing on bipartisanship for its own sake.

I really don't understand how bipartisanship is ever going to work when one of the parties is insane. Imagine trying to negotiate an agreement on dinner plans with your date, and you suggest Italian and she states her preference would be a meal of tire rims and anthrax. If you can figure out a way to split the difference there and find a meal you will both enjoy, you can probably figure out how bipartisanship is going to work the next few years.

Andrew Sullivan is right to hope for sanity to return to the Republican Party. Until then, compromise can lead to severe digestive problems.

Matt at DemConWatch has posted the minute-by-minute inauguration ceremony schedule.

Andrew Sullivan asks a vital question of the main-stream media:

A simple question: now that the chief Gitmo prosecutor has said that Qahtani was tortured, will the New York Times, the AP, Newsweek and the Washington Post stop using words and euphemisms that are not true? Or do we have to endure more linguistic cowardice from the MSM?

Alas, I'm going to bet on cowardice.

I admit that I am disappointed that with all of our technology and security that a solution has not been found to allow President-Elect Obama to continue to have a Blackberry after he takes the oath of office.

Yes, the e-mails he sends could be made public. Such transparency is not a flaw in my mind.

The New York Daily News had the idea to ask some major advertising people to use this situation and design ads that use the Obama situation as a jumping off point for an ad campaign for Blackberry.

It's a fun series. My favorite is slide number 7.

The Washington Post's Dan Froomkin gets it done:

He took the nation to a war of choice under false pretenses -- and left troops in harm's way on two fields of battle. He embraced torture as an interrogation tactic and turned the world's champion of human dignity into an outlaw nation and international pariah. He watched with detachment as a major American city went under water. He was ostensibly at the helm as the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression took hold. He went from being the most popular to the most disappointing president, having squandered a unique opportunity to unite the country and even the world behind a shared agenda after Sept. 11. He set a new precedent for avoiding the general public in favor of screened audiences and seemed to occupy an alternate reality. He took his own political party from seeming permanent majority status to where it is today. And he deliberately politicized the federal government, circumvented the traditional policymaking process, ignored expert advice and suppressed dissent, leaving behind a broken government.

Heck of a job, Mr. President.

Salon's Glenn Greenwald is impressed with President-Elect Barack Obama's pick to lead the Office of Legal Counsel.

The Office of Legal Counsel, inside the Justice Department, is probably the most consequential federal government office that remains relatively obscure. The legal opinions which it issues become, more or less automatically, the official legal position of the Executive Branch. It was from that office that John Yoo, Jay Bybee and others did so much damage, issuing now-infamous memoranda that established the regime of lawlessness that has dominated our political institutions over the last eight years. Other than Attorney General-designate Eric Holder and Obama himself, there is probably no official who will have a more significant role in determining the extent to which the Obama administration really does reverse the lawlessness and legal radicalism of the Bush years.

Today, as The Boston Globe just reported, Barack Obama announced several new appointments to key DOJ posts, including Dawn Johnsen to head the OLC. Johnsen is a Professor of Law at Indiana University, a former OLC official in the Clinton administration (as well as a former ACLU counsel), and a graduate of Yale Law School. She's become a true expert on executive power and, specifically, the role and obligation of the OLC in restricting presidential decisions to their lawful scope.

There are several striking pieces of evidence that suggest this appointment may be Obama's best yet, perhaps by far. Consider, first, this rather emphatic Slate article authored by Johnsen in the wake of the disclosure, last April, of the 81-page John Yoo Memo which declared that the President's power to torture detainees is virtually limitless. Her article is notable at least as much for its tone as for its substance...

Reading her articles does bring hope that after the Bush Administration leaves, the rule of law may return to the White House.

Kevin Drum wonders why Republicans never name Abraham Lincoln as their favorite president -- is it because the GOP has produced only one president in the past century about which they can cheer after his term?

I am sure no one was editing the text messages being shown on Fox News Channel on New Years Eve.

So much that is wrong about the Bush Administration is highlighted in the following note written by Crooks & Liars' Jon Perr:

10 days ago, the Obama transition team notified about 90 of the Pentagon's 250 Bush political appointees that their services would no longer be needed after Inauguration Day. But despite DoD spokesman Geoff Morrell's declaration that holdover Republican Defense Secretary Robert Gates was "absolutely satisfied" with way the transition was being handled, one loyal Bushie at the Pentagon was anything but. Jim O'Beirne - the same Jim O'Beirne who famously populated the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad with Republican campaign hacks and Bush bath-water drinkers - is crying foul.

Really -- of all the people who should just be quiet and disappear into the retired Republican hack ether, Jim O'Beirne is near the top of the list.

O'Beirne's mismanagement of the hiring during the initial stages of the Iraq reconstruction helped to create the horrible situation there. His insistence on hiring people loyal to George W. Bush over people who, um, actually had experience in rebuilding a country following a war is unforgivable.

Frankly, the fact that O'Beirne still has a job in the government after all of these years is a huge scandal.