Letters to the Editor

The oversight joke The FBI director appears at a House hearing expressly designed to get answers on the anthrax investigation. As always with congressional hearings, no answers are obtained. Glenn Greenwald [2008-09-16]

• Mickey Edwards addressed this profound problem beautifully today

  His answers during Feingold's SJC subcommittee Rule of Law hearing this morning were like salve on a wound. [The democratic/separation of powers process trumps every debatable policy issue in importance, yet both Republicans and Democrats have failed to remedy ongoing, gross abuses of that process; every member of Congress is responsible for acting to defend the Constitution, not just some limited "gang" of read-in legislators hand-selected by the Executive Branch; if the law limits the ability of Congress to rebut misleading, selectively declassified facts, change the law to allow those in the know in Congress to respond in kind, etc., etc.]

  Edwards's (transcribed) opening statement gives a good overview and taste of his testimony today, and is in complete sympathy with Glenn's points in this post, in rightfully chastising - to their faces (or at least to three of them) - the ongoing abandonment by Members of Congress of their branch's irreplaceable role in our government:

  There are a great many salient questions facing the American people and those of you who are charged with the responsibility of enacting the nation's laws: access to affordable health care; repair of an aging infrastructure; reducing energy dependence; ensuring the national security. But not one of those issues – and not all of them combined – is as important now or for the future as securing our position as a nation governed by the rule of law. In our case, as a nation, the principal law that governs us and to which all other laws are subordinate is the United States Constitution which spells out the powers, and the limits on the powers, of the government as a whole and the component parts of the government.

  .

  -snip-

  Let me be both candid and clear: the current greatest threat to our system of separated powers and the protections it affords stems not just from executive overreaching but equally from the Congress. America's founders envisioned a system in which each of the branches of government would guard its prerogatives and meet its obligations, each acting to serve the nation through the empowerment the Constitution grants and to protect our liberties through the constraints the Constitution imposes.

  For most of the past eight years, and for many years before that, the Congress has failed to lived up to its assigned role as the principal representative of the people. Congress's constitutional role includes primary authority over spending priorities, tax policies, and the choice over whether or not to go to war. All of these decisions require the gathering of the information necessary to act judiciously. All of these decisions require a willingness to see to it that those decisions are complied with.

  But in recent years, instead of fulfilling this important trust, Congress has too often been silent.

  -snip-

  When the Justice Department refused to enforce a congressional finding of contempt, the Congress of the United States was forced to file a civil suit, as any citizen might do, as though it were not an equal branch of government.

  When the Congress has required information about the undertaking of covert actions by the Administration or when it needs access to information the Executive has designated as classified, the Congress has permitted the Executive to dictate who among the members of Congress and their staffs may have access to that information. The result is the situation in which information is available to hundreds of Executive Branch staff members but withheld not only from congressional staff members but from members of Congress themselves. And with this, the Congress meekly complies.

  -snip-

  Here is the challenge, stated as candidly as I can state it. Each year the presidency grows farther beyond the bounds the Constitution permits; each year the Congress fades farther into irrelevance. As it does, the voice of the people is silenced. This cannot be permitted to stand. The Congress is not without power. It can refuse to confirm people the President suggests for important offices; it can refuse to provide money for the carrying out of Executive Branch activities; it can use its subpoena power and its power to hold hearings and above all, it can use its power to write the laws of the country.

  -snip-

  Do not let it be said that what the Founders created, you have destroyed. Do not let it be said that on your watch, the Constitution of the United States became not the law of the land but a suggestion. You are not a parliament; you are a Congress – separate, independent, and equal. And because of that you are the principal means by which the people maintain control of their government. Defend that right, and that obligation, or you lose all purpose in holding these high offices. That is how you preserve and defend the rule of law in the United States. - Mickey Edwards

  http://judiciary.senate.gov/hearings/testimony.cfm?id=3550&wit_id=7407

  Russ Feingold welcomed Edwards's statement as "historic" and probably broader than the "confines" of this one hearing. Disturbingly, though, in listening to Feingold's closing remarks, I started to wonder whether Feingold hadn't missed an essential point of the testimony - that Edwards was addressing the core of the problems prompting the hearing today, not just some broader, semi-related problem.

  Feingold in closing - I guess by force of long, deferential habit (and doubtless with an Obama presidency in mind) - reverted to rhetoric about "hoping" that the next man occupying the presidency will unilaterally decide to police the Executive Branch, thereby voluntarily returning it to the practice of honoring the limits of law at the highest levels. The now-obvious, open breaches in those limits so relentlessly exploited by this administration would remain intact and available, under such a scenario, until another bad actor got into the White House, and the cycle would then repeat itself, despite all the lessons we should have learned by now, which have highlighted the imperative need to fill and block those breaches, once and for all.

  -- pow wow
  [Read pow wow's other letters]
  Permalink Flag Tuesday, September 16, 2008 12:52 PM
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