This is supposed to be a democracy, with checks and balances and no single omnipotent ruler, right?

[QUOTE]This morning, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) delivered an impassioned floor speech to help frame the debate over FISA reform. Using his privilege as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Whitehouse said he has “spent hours poring over” secret opinions issued by the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) — and he took notes.

Whitehouse is a lawyer, a former U.S. Attorney, a former legal counsel to Rhode Island’s Governor, and a former State Attorney General. He said he sought and received permission to have his notes declassified because he wanted to show the public “what the Bush administration does behind our backs when they think no one is looking.”

“To give you an example of what I read,” Whitehouse said on the Senate floor, “I have gotten three legal propositions from these secret OLC opinions declassified. Here they are, as accurately as my note-taking could reproduce them from the classified documents”:

1. An executive order cannot limit a President. There is no constitutional requirement for a President to issue a new executive order whenever he wishes to depart from the terms of a previous executive order. Rather than violate an executive order, the President has instead modified or waived it.

2. The President, exercising his constitutional authority under Article II, can determine whether an action is a lawful exercise of the President’s authority under Article II.

3. The Department of Justice is bound by the President’s legal determinations.[/QUOTE]

[url]http://thinkprogress.org/2007/12/07/whitehouse-speech-olc/[/url]

:roll::roll::roll::roll::roll:

Re: Why We're Screwed With Bush at the Helm

Well to be honest as far as I know this is ridiculous and quite impossible...this would require changes to the constitution...

As far as I know when it comes to Executive orders... ----a president issues them and he is bound by them... ----he can not change it without the permission of congress ----his executive orders are lawful until a case is brought to the supreme court challenging it and the court declares it unconstitutional…

I am not really up to date with this FISA business...can you please explain, they want to ammend this act so that the president has these powers you listed above??? is that right? That doesn't really make much sense??

Re: Why We're Screwed With Bush at the Helm

[QUOTE=Shpira;549905]Well to be honest as far as I know this is ridiculous and quite impossible...this would require changes to the constitution... [/QUOTE]

You're exactly right, and that is exactly the point -- he can't constitutionally do these things or determine what the scope of his own powers are, but these memos reflect that that is how he views his power and how he exercises it.

I'll respond separately as to the FISA business, because I can probably do it quicker by reference to earlier posts on the topic than describing it anew...

Re: Why We're Screwed With Bush at the Helm

[QUOTE=Shpira;549905] I am not really up to date with this FISA business...can you please explain, they want to ammend this act so that the president has these powers you listed above??? is that right? That doesn't really make much sense??[/QUOTE]

FISA stands for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. It has many provisions, but for the purposes of this discussion, what you need to know is that it gives the government the authority to wiretap a phone if there is reason to believe that national security interests are implicated. Under FISA, you get permission to do this by going to a court dedicated to hearing these sorts of requests, secretly (so the people we're spying on don't know we intend to tap their phone), and they give you a warrant to perform your search. If some exigency exists such that going to the court before tapping the phone would defeat the purpose of the search (i.e., a suspected terrorist is about to get on the phone and you don't have time to run to the court), you can conduct the search provided you go to the court within 72 hours to get a warrant after the fact.

A couple of years ago, it came out that phones were being tapped and no warrants were ever obtained -- before or after the fact. Bush wants authority to do that, Congress has given his the right to on a temporary basis (although that expires in Feb, I think) and the current fight is over whether FISA will be permanently amended to allow warrantless wiretaps. That's the dispute, in a nutshell.

There have been numerous discussions on this board about both sides of the issue. Here are some, feel free to read through if you're interested:

[url]http://www.mercuryserver.com/forums/showthread.php?t=21003[/url]

[url]http://www.mercuryserver.com/forums/showthread.php?t=21114[/url]

[url]http://www.mercuryserver.com/forums/showthread.php?t=22093[/url]