Bush Overstepped Constitutional Bounds
GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba, Nov. 8 - A federal judge ruled Monday that President Bush had both overstepped his constitutional bounds and improperly brushed aside the Geneva Conventions in establishing military commissions to try detainees at the United States naval base here as war criminals.
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posted by Pamela J. Leavey at 11:39 PM
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Why the Specter flap matters
By Thomas Oliphant, Globe Columnist | November 9, 2004
WASHINGTON
MY FIRST reaction to news of l'Affaire Specter was bemusement -- a classic example of post-election, multisided bloviation.
Upon reflection and a little reporting, I've decided that the assault from the right on the Pennsylvania Republican senator just elected to a fifth term is in fact serious, revealing, and possibly an early indicator of the latest attempt by conservatives -- after a generation of false starts -- to actually govern the country. The knee-jerk thing would be to come to Arlen Specter's defense while he is under assault by forces normally characterized by people of my bent as primarily loony.
Bad idea. For one thing, Specter is not worth defending; at best he is relentlessly quirky, at worst opportunistic. For another, in this formative, postelection period, it is more useful to understand the forces that instantly became so furious at him last week.
The flap directly involves an ancient goal of conservative politics -- reshaping the federal judiciary. Orrin Hatch of Utah is about to cease being chairman of the Judiciary Committee -- through whose portals all judicial nominees must pass -- because of one of the lingering inanities of the brief Newt Gingrich era: term limits. By seniority, Specter is next.
Specter faced a primary opponent to his right ideologically and then a moderately demanding general election. With the votes behind him, he opined that future judicial nominees by President Bush who clearly do not favor abortion rights as embodied in Roe v. Wade are likely not to be confirmed. That is not exactly what he said, but I am positive that is all he meant. He made no threat or promise involving his own behavior. It is clear, however, that in classic Specter fashion, he was declaring himself a player.
On the right, Specter's comment was taken as a threat. The ensuing furor produced a flurry of "clarifications" by Specter, all designed to assure conservatives that as chairman he would do nothing to retard the confirmation process of any Bush nominee. None of those statements has quieted the furor.
The Bush White House --which could stop the whole thing quickly and decisively if it wished to -- has decided to let Specter twist a bit longer. This is in part punishment and in part to see just how deep the furor's roots are. The same attitude has been taken by the Senate Republican leadership (notably the majority leader, Bill Frist, and his second-in-command, Mitch McConnell), who could also have stopped all this quickly.
I am told that Specter's ascension is not immediately threatened, but having already produced several Specter twitches, the conservative inclination is to see how many more twitches can be induced. The hearings process for judges is not really at issue here; what is at issue are Specter's votes on the floor and his vigor in opposing the occasional Democratic effort to block votes on judges whose background they consider extreme. Some conservatives believe there are few limits on how far Specter will go to assure his position.
But all of them don't trust him. He was a pivotal figure in the rejection of Reagan's nominee Robert Bork for the Supreme Court 17 years ago, and he was one of the Republicans voting to acquit President Clinton after his Senate trial in 1999. It does not matter to conservatives that this was his only Supreme Court "no" vote and that he was a boorish abuser of Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas imbroglio in 1991.
It's important to see all this through the right's lens. Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980; since then, conservatives have been president 16 of 24 years; the party has held the Senate for 16 different years and directly controlled the House for 10 and had effective control of the floor for two more (1981-82).
From one Christian conservative perspective, during this period there have been more than 25 million abortions, gay rights have advanced rapidly, family structures have come under cultural assault, pornography has become an industry, and Hollywood continues to undermine parents' authority.
Other conservatives note that the federal government has expanded instead of shrunk, its spending has not been restrained, its direct influence over public schools has increased, and entitlement programs have been added. Many conservatives see the Republican Party as successful at running campaigns and winning elections, but they wonder if their standard-bearers and strategists (right now that means George Bush and Karl Rove) have any interest in actually changing things.
With Chief Justice William Rehnquist's health in doubt, the sense of urgency is only increased. That's why l'Affaire Specter is important. Actually achieving results will take old-fashioned party discipline. Whether to try to impose it is the issue here, and a lot of Republicans much more important than Specter are involved. Conservatives have won elections; some of them now want to actually change things in this country.
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2004/11/09/why_the_specter_flap_matters/
Bush has overstepped the Constitution in many areas, including with the Patiot Act and his spending money on Iraq which was appropriated for Afghanistan prior to the Iraq war. The degree of control over Congress exerted by the Bush administration also violates the spirit of the Constitution, as Frisk and Delay have acted to weaken the power of committee chair in favor of tight partisan control of the Senate and House.
Democrats need to use resotration of the ideals of the founding fathers, including religious tolerance, to broaden thier base. While the founding fathers did not envsion political parties, the two party system is also a well established tradition and we also need to point how the dangers of decsions being made by one political party, especially now that it is under the control of right wing extremists.
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