| Obama Acts Like He Doesn't Know He's an Executive-Power Extremist [message #115962] |
Thu, 19 September 2013 15:09 |
CyberkNight
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Registered: July 2012
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It's often hard to tell if President Obama is lying to the American people or to himself. Is he willfully misrepresenting who he is? Or is he blind to his true self? Over the last five years he has repudiated many of the positions he took in 2008, but still talks like and perhaps likes to think of himself as the man who ran on change.
A passage from his Tuesday speech on Syria provides a striking example. The relevant passage -- an aside on executive power -- comes just after the president explains that he favors a strike on Syria to deter the use of chemical weapons (emphasis added):
That's my judgment as commander-in-chief. But I'm also the president of the world's oldest constitutional democracy. So even though I possess the authority to order military strikes, I believed it was right, in the absence of a direct or imminent threat to our security, to take this debate to Congress. I believe our democracy is stronger when the president acts with the support of Congress. And I believe that America acts more effectively abroad when we stand together. This is especially true after a decade that put more and more war-making power in the hands of the president, and more and more burdens on the shoulders of our troops, while sidelining the people's representatives from the critical decisions about when we use force.
What a fascinating paragraph! Even as Obama implies that he is a circumspect steward of constitutional democracy, he asserts that even absent "a direct or imminent threat," he has absolute power to wage war without congressional support, the Constitution and the opinions of the demos be damned. If the passage ended there it would be staggering in its internal tension. As Jack Goldsmith explained in detail, intervening in Syria without congressional sign-off would "push presidential war unilateralism beyond where it has gone before." Asserting that power without using it is still an extreme position to take.
Obama goes a delusion farther. Ostensibly because he hasn't yet intervened, even though he repeatedly and needlessly asserts his right to do so unilaterally, he casts himself as moving away from unilateralism and toward consulting Congress. The benefits are "especially true after a decade that put more and more war-making power in the hands of the president," he notes, "while sidelining the people's representatives from the critical decisions about when we use force."
The grammer is priceless. Who "put more and more war-making power in the hands of the president"? In Obama's telling, "a decade" put the executive power there.
The absence of a human subject in the sentence isn't hard to figure out. For all President George W. Bush's faults, he sought and received majority support for the Patriot Act, the September 2001 AUMF, the War in Afghanistan, and the War in Iraq. Obama's expansion of the drone war and his illegal war-making in Libya didn't turn out as bad as Iraq, so it's hard to see him as a worse president, but Obama has done more than Bush to expand the war-making power of the White House. As for "sidelining the people's representatives from the critical decisions about when we use force," it's Obama who went into Libya despite the fact that a House vote to approve U.S. involvement was brought to the floor and voted down.
Yet Obama complains about these trends as if someone other than Obama is responsible for them, and as if he has been and remains powerless to do more to reverse them. When Obama asked Congress to vote in Syria, no one forced him to insist that he had the power to intervene militarily even if a legislative vote declared otherwise. No one forced him to defend the extreme position that the presidential war power is so sweeping that it includes waging wars of choice rejected by Congress that don't involve any direct or imminent threat to the United States.
Full article: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/09/obama-ac ts-like-he-doesnt-know-hes-an-executive-power-extremist/2795 83/
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