When President Bush signed the reauthorization of the USA Patriot Act this month, he included an addendum saying that he did not feel obliged to obey requirements that he inform Congress about how the FBI was using the act's expanded police powers.Sometimes you have to ask why we bother with that whole "legislative process" thing.
The bill contained several oversight provisions intended to make sure the FBI did not abuse the special terrorism-related powers to search homes and secretly seize papers. The provisions require Justice Department officials to keep closer track of how often the FBI uses the new powers and in what type of situations. Under the law, the administration would have to provide the information to Congress by certain dates.
. . .
In the statement, Bush said that he did not consider himself bound to tell Congress how the Patriot Act powers were being used and that, despite the law's requirements, he could withhold the information if he decided that disclosure would ''impair foreign relations, national security, the deliberative process of the executive, or the performance of the executive's constitutional duties."
Bush wrote: ''The executive branch shall construe the provisions . . . that call for furnishing information to entities outside the executive branch . . . in a manner consistent with the president's constitutional authority to supervise the unitary executive branch and to withhold information . . . "
Anyway, back to your Duke pile-ons or your gawking at the train wreck that is the Ben Domenech Experience.
3 comments:
and people wonder why he has never vetoed a bill...
Exactly. Bush has pretty much given himself a line-item veto. Which, as we all know, was deemed unconstitutional.
This is total horseshit. If Bush doesn't like provisions or portions of a law, he should veto it and send it back to Congress.
This amounts to a tacit agreement between him and his rubber-stamp lackey Republicans in Congress, that everyone gets to benefit and grandstand when they pass a PATRIOT Act or an anti-torture bill, but no one is actually bound to it. Congress is absolved from any real oversight, and Bush gets to do whatever the fuck he wants.
This stopped being the government we all learned about quite a while ago.
What's even funnier -- in that disturbing way that this administration can be funny -- is that the Republicans are going around attacking Democrats for arguing for modifications and alterations to the Patriot Act, when their own Dear Leader routinely and unconstitutionally alters critical legislation....
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