http://www.alternet.org/story/57252
King George W.: James Madison's Nightmare
By Robert Scheer, Truthdig
Posted on July 18, 2007, Printed on July 18, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/57252/
George W. Bush is the imperial president that James Madison and other
founders of this great republic warned us about. He lied the nation into
precisely the "foreign entanglements" that George Washington feared
would destroy the experiment in representative government, and he has
championed a spurious notion of security over individual liberty, thus
eschewing the alarms of Thomas Jefferson as to the deprivation of the
inalienable rights of free citizens. But most important, he has used the
sledgehammer of war to obliterate the separation of powers that James
Madison enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.
With the "war on terror," Bush has asserted the right of the president
to wage war anywhere and for any length of time, at his whim, because
the "terrorists" will always provide a convenient shadowy target. Just
the "continual warfare" that Madison warned of in justifying the primary
role of Congress in initiating and continuing to finance a war -- the
very issue now at stake in Bush's battle with Congress.
In his "Political Observations," written years before he served as
fourth president of the United States, Madison went on to underscore the
dangers of an imperial presidency bloated by war fever. "In war,"
Madison wrote in 1795, at a time when the young republic still faced its
share of dangerous enemies, "the discretionary power of the Executive is
extended ... and all the means of seducing the minds are added to those
of subduing the force, of the people."
How remarkably prescient of Madison to anticipate the specter of our
current King George imperiously undermining Congress' attempts to end
the Iraq war. When the prime author of the U.S. Constitution explained
why that document grants Congress -- not the president -- the exclusive
power to declare and fund wars, Madison wrote, "A delegation of such
powers [to the president] would have struck, not only at the fabric of
our Constitution, but at the foundation of all well organized and well
checked governments."
Because "[n]o nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of
continual warfare," Madison urged that the constitutional separation of
powers he had codified be respected. "The Constitution expressly and
exclusively vests in the Legislature the power of declaring a state of
war ... the power of raising armies," he wrote. "The separation of the
power of raising armies from the power of commanding them is intended to
prevent the raising of armies for the sake of commanding them."
That last sentence perfectly describes the threat of what President
Dwight Eisenhower, 165 years later, would describe as the
"military-industrial complex," a permanent war economy feeding off a
permanent state of insecurity. The collapse of the Soviet Union deprived
the military profiteers and their handsomely rewarded cheerleaders in
the government of a raison d'être for the massive war economy supposedly
created in response to it. Fortunately for them, Bush found in the 9/11
attack an excuse to make war even more profitable and longer lasting.
The Iraq war, which the president's 9/11 Commission concluded never had
anything to do with the terrorist assault, nonetheless has transferred
many hundreds of billions in taxpayer dollars into the military economy.
And when Congress seeks to exercise its power to control the budget,
this president asserts that this will not govern his conduct of the war.
There never was a congressional declaration of war to cover the invasion
of Iraq. Instead, President Bush acted under his claimed power as
commander in chief, which the Supreme Court has held does allow him to
respond to a "state of war" against the United States. That proviso was
clearly a reference to surprise attacks or sudden emergencies.
The problem is that the "state of war" in question here was an al-Qaida
attack on the U.S. that had nothing whatsoever to do with Saddam
Hussein's Iraq. Perhaps to spare Congress the embarrassment of formally
declaring war against a nation that had not attacked America, Bush
settled for a loosely worded resolution supporting his use of military
power if Iraq failed to comply with U.N. mandates. This was justified by
the White House as a means of strengthening the United Nations in
holding Iraq accountable for its WMD arsenal, but as most of the world
looked on in dismay, Bush invaded Iraq after U.N. inspectors on the
ground discovered that Iraq had no WMD.
Bush betrayed Congress, which in turn betrayed the American people --
just as Madison feared when he wrote: "Of all the enemies to public
liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it compromises
and develops the germ of every other."
Robert Scheer is the co-author of The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us
About Iraq. See more of Robert Scheer at TruthDig.
© 2007 Independent Media Institute
--
Atheist n A person to be pitied in that he is
unable to believe things for which there is
no evidence, and who has thus deprived himself of
a convenient means of feeling superior to others.
—Chaz Bufe, The American Heretic’s Dictionary
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