"The power of the President is greater than "the rule of law." (WTF?) WSJ

IChing

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Wed May-02-07 11:07 AM
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"The power of the President is greater than "the rule of law." (WTF?) WSJ

Edited on Wed May-02-07 11:15 AM by IChing

Glenn Greenwald
Wednesday May 2, 2007 10:32 EST

The Wall St. Journal online has today published a lengthy and truly
astonishing article by Harvard Government Professor Harvey Mansfield,
which expressly argues that the power of the President is greater than "the rule of law."

The article bears this headline: The Case for the Strong Executive --
Under some circumstances, the Rule of Law must yield to the need for Energy.
And it is the most explicit argument I have seen yet for vesting in the President
the power to override and ignore the rule of law in order to recieve the glories
of what Mansfield calls "one-man rule.">>>snip

But reading Mansfield has real value for understanding the dominant
right-wing movement in this country. Because he is an academic,
and a quite intelligent one, he makes intellectually honest arguments,
by which I mean that he does not disguise what he thinks in politically
palatable slogans, but instead really describes the actual premises on which
political beliefs are based.

And that is Mansfield's value; he is a clear and honest embodiment
of what the Bush movement is. In particular, he makes crystal clear that
the so-called devotion to a "strong executive" by the Bush administration
and the movement which supports it is nothing more than a belief that
the Leader has the power to disregard, violate, and remain above the rule of law.
And that is clear because Mansfied explicitly says that.
And that is not just Mansfield's idiosyncratic belief. He is simply stating
-- honestly and clearly -- the necessary premises of the model of
the Omnipotent Presidency which has taken root under the Bush presidency.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/05/02/mansfield/
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In the same vain...............................on the same day...........................................

Administration Pulls Back on Surveillance Agreement (Warrentless is OK)
Source: NY times

WASHINGTON, May 1 � Senior Bush administration officials told Congress on Tuesday that they could not pledge that the administration would continue to seek warrants from a secret court for a domestic wiretapping program, as it agreed to do in January.

Rather, they argued that the president had the constitutional authority to decide for himself whether to conduct surveillance without warrants.

As a result of the January agreement, the administration said that the National Security Agency�s domestic spying program has been brought under the legal structure laid out in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires court-approved warrants for the wiretapping of American citizens and others inside the United States.

But on Tuesday, the senior officials, including Michael McConnell, the new director of national intelligence, said they believed that the president still had the authority under Article II of the Constitution to once again order the N.S.A. to conduct surveillance inside the country without warrants.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x2831368