What Is The Real Bush Agenda?

This writer questions the attention span of the American public: as this Bush administration mess continues to assail our sensibilities one wonders at the determination of these so-called Americans to further their nefarious agenda which serves only to destroy and cripple American freedom.

Enough criminal money has been made to float anybody’s boat, so one also questions if greed is sufficient reason for this continuing attack on and disregard of American liberties.

That said, one looks at the other possible reasons for this agenda: perhaps a totalitarian regime with American citizens forbidden to leave the shores of this great country as a result of the “immigrant” walls and technological upgrades to our borders with Canada and Mexico, and thence, all the strictures that come with life in a dictatorship?

This writer believes that the real agenda of the Bush administration is yet to be uncovered and this writer also hopes that when that particular agenda becomes common knowledge, it is not then too late to bring these criminals to justice and to regain the very freedoms we are in the process of losing today.

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January 9, 2006
Editorial

President Bush at Recess

It is disturbing that President Bush has exhibited a grandiose vision of executive power that leaves little room for public debate, the concerns of the minority party or the supervisory powers of the courts. But it is just plain baffling to watch him take the same regal attitude toward a Congress in which his party holds solid majorities in both houses.

Seizing the opportunity presented by the Congressional holiday break, Mr. Bush announced 17 recess appointments - a constitutional gimmick that allows a president to appoint someone when Congress is in recess to a job that normally requires Senate approval. The appointee serves until the next round of Congressional elections.

This end run around Senate confirmation was built into the Constitution to allow the president to quickly fill vacancies that came up when lawmakers were out of town, to keep the government running smoothly in times when travelers and mail moved by horseback and Congress met part time.

Modern presidents have employed this power to place nominees who ran into political trouble in the Senate. Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton made scores of recess appointments. But both of them faced a Congress controlled by the opposition party, while the Senate has been under Republican control for Mr. Bush's entire five years in office.

In some cases, Mr. Bush has used the recess appointment power to rescue egregiously bad selections that would never pass muster on grounds of experience and competence. (Remember last year's recess appointment of the undiplomatic and Congressionally unacceptable John Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations.) In other cases, he has merely sought to avoid logjams that the White House created for itself by refusing to accommodate reasonable Democratic requests for information, documents and consultation.

Among those Mr. Bush unilaterally elevated to important posts this time around was Julie Myers, a government lawyer with ultrathin credentials whom Mr. Bush appointed to head the 15,000-person Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, the government's second largest investigative force.

Also on the list was Ellen Sauerbrey, the unqualified political crony Mr. Bush chose to head the billion-dollar-a-year State Department office that helps coordinate emergency relief efforts for refugees abroad, and whose nomination had stalled for just cause in the Foreign Relations Committee.

Mr. Bush also bypassed Senate hearings on a new deputy defense secretary and for three of the six seats on the Federal Election Commission. The election commission appointees include Hans von Spakovsky, a Justice Department lawyer who overrode the objection of career lawyers to gain approval of a Georgia voter identification plan almost certain to harm black voters.

The White House regularly accuses Senate Democrats of unfairly blocking the president's nominees, and it is true that one determined senator can freeze an appointment. But Mr. Bush's record in this area owes less to unreasonable Democrats than to the low caliber of some of his choices, his disinterest in bipartisan consensus and his aversion to any form of accountability, whether to the Senate, the courts or the public.

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