US Senator Patrick Leahy (Democrat Vermont):
” Over the past seven years, the Bush administration has aggressively sought to expand executive power in alarming ways. Public accountability has been repeatedly frustrated because so many of the administration’s actions have been cloaked in secrecy…//…It is through the press that we first learned about secret surveillance of Americans by their own government in the years after 9/11, secret renditions abroad in violation of U.S. laws, secret prisons abroad, secret decisions to fire some of the nation’s top prosecutors, and the secret destruction of interrogation tapes that may have contained evidence of torture. Having relied on an overly expansive, self-justifying view of executive power, the Bush administration now seeks secrecy for its actions. It has taken a legal doctrine that was intended to protect sensitive, national security information and seems to be using it to evade accountability for its own misdeeds”
The Congress is the branch most sensitive and receptive to the will of the people. Unlike the executive branch elections are held continuously rather than every fourth year, putting pressure on Senators and Representatives not to stray to far away from their constituency and use their constitutional responsibility to guard against abuses of power.
The Founding Fathers knew that unless political power was distributed between co-equal branches that could check and balance one another, a small group of people could grab a disproportional amount of it. By expanding the power of the executive branch, on account of the legislative, it will become so much easier to win control of a people and its’ resources as there is only one seat that matters – and only every fourth year, unless those rules change too. Whatever powers, groups or interests one fears is intent on ruling the world would certainly like that kind of opportunity.
Increasing the power of the presidency means much more than just a certain interpretation of the constitution or that the legislative branch lose power.
Ultimately it means that the American people lose power.
Testimony of the Honorable Mickey Edwards
A former member of Congress from the State of Oklahoma and The Aspen Institute.
House Judicial Committee Hearing on Presidential Signing Statements under the Bush Administration
“….there is a view of the Presidency articulated by the current
President, which considers the executive branch to be a single
unit under the sole direction of the President, and according to this
theory of the unitary Executive, the legislative branch of Government
may not instruct executive branch agencies in the performance
of their duties…//… The Congress, you all, may require a Federal agency to report on some matter, but at best that requirement simply becomes a suggestion and probably one that will not be taken too seriously….//…any Presidential assertion of the right to ignore the law must be challenged or it will become precedent.
…//…I may not agree with the policies of the next
President. And future Presidents can rely on that unchallenged assertion
