Legislatin's Hard Work
Legislating from the Oval Office that is.When will we as a nation get around to having a discussion about whether Executive Orders are consitutional or not? This whole dust-up about the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretaps is based on the president issuing an Executive Order.
It's one thing to issue a proclamation and an Executive Order stating that we as a nation recognize Punxsatawny Phil's sage advice about when winter will end, and quite another issuing an order to have telecom companies participate in data mining activities that monitor billions of phone calls and e-mails on American soil.
When the president can authorize the creation and funding of a whole new program of spying without any real congressional oversight, we've entered the weird new land of democracy-on-the-fly. I guess we shouldn't be shocked that under a preseident like George W. Bush, it's make up the rules along the way.
Some Executive Orders may be benign and/or under the perview of the executive branch, but others are just flat-out unconstitutional. A Congress with any balls would curtail this made-up power.
Update: corrected the first sentence. Ooops.
Update II: I wrote the good folks over at the American Prospect to comment on this post. We'll see if they get back to me. Hope so...
posted by FuzzFinger @ 1/11/2006 05:29:00 PM
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