Alito and the "Unitary Executive"

It seems that the difficulties in earning a living will occasionally prevent me from posting more than once a week. I'll try to avoid letting that happen too often.

Not that I have any evidence that anyone but me is reading my scribblings. (*sigh*) I guess I'm not nearly as entertaining as I think I am. I am, however, the master of the run-on sentence. And to prove it, let us consider the strange case of Samuel Alito.

As far as anyone can tell, the nomination of the uniquely unqualified Harriet Meiers as Supreme Court justice was just a feint by Bush, to see just how stupid a decision he could make and get away with it. And since he didn't, in fact, get away with that one, he stopped letting his ADHD make decisions for him, and went back to his original purpose: the gutting of the US Constitution, and the remaking of the United States in his own, uniquely Stalinesque image.

Bush has managed to get away with a number of things that the American people should have objected to, but not everything has worked out the way he wanted.

OK, really, not much has worked out exactly the way he wanted. The Iraqi people didn't welcome us with flowers, he couldn't dismantle Social Security, and every time he tries to take a vacation, people point out that he's spent more time clearing brush on the Crawford ranch than most presidents have spent on the toilet.

(And to be fair, that last argument completely ignores William Howard Taft and the Constipation Crisis of 1911, but it took a special Congressional Order requiring them to invoke the Federal High Colonic to clear that up.)

However, in Samuel Alito, Bush has found a way to ignore 230 years of American history and give the Presidential Finger to the "Founding Fathers."

You see, despite that whole "we don't want a king, so we'll elect a President with severely restricted powers" argument that describes the state of mind of Jefferson, Adams, and the rest of the Constitutional Congress, Bush got tired of not having god-like powers. So to counter this, Bush nominated the only judge in America who thought that what our country needed was a "Unitary Executive."

Here's the problem. In the early days of America, our "Founding Fathers" (who, admittedly, weren't always saints either) were pretty strongly opposed to America being governed by a King. They'd tried that form of government, and they didn't enjoy it. They had some pretty strong ideas about how much power a president should have.

Unfortunately, Bush doesn't agree that his power should be limited. But fortunately for him, he found a judge who agreed with him. In 2001, Alito gave a speech to the Federalist Society, where he said, "When I was in (the Office of Legal Counsel)..., we were strong proponents of the theory of the unitary executive, that all federal executive power is vested by the Constitution in the President. And I thought then, and I still think, that this theory best captures the meaning of the Constitution's text and structure . . . ."

"All federal executive power." That's what Alito believes Bush should have. It seems that having the ability to gut environmental laws and being able to take the country to war for no apparent reason isn't good enough. Alito wants Bush to be the next Pharoah.

The eternal God-Emperor. That should satisfy them, shouldn't it?

Will we have to start building pyramids next?