Kutler on Republican Executive Powers

Waxing America's favorite Emeritus Professor in the entire galaxy, the esteemed University of Wisconsin Constitutional scholar Stanley Kutler, reminds us that the Republican Party, with an almost century long record of limiting the power of the president, now embraces what could be called an imperial presidency:

  Hunkering Down in Baghdad

Voltaire had it right: history is nothing but a pack of tricks that we play on the dead...

...Executive power expanded enormously during World War II. After the war, old guard Republicans, still rooted in isolationism, proposed a constitutional amendment to give Congress authority to regulate all executive agreements with foreign powers....Republican concerns that first President Franklin D. Roosevelt at Yalta and then President Harry S. Truman at Potsdam had bargained away too much....The GOP also objected to Truman’s sending troops to Korea in 1950 without congressional approval.

Kulter notes that with the Bush Administration is "... betting that the rest of the world, from Europe to Asia, will quietly accept U.S. troops to defend their economic interests..."

Kutler writes that Bush "may have made a prophet of former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, who said last September that “the Iraq war is largely about oil” and essential for the global economy."

Comments

[Albert]

If Greenspan is a prophet, those of us who knew BEFORE the U.S. invasion of Iraq that it was only about oil are the second coming. Here is another prediction: Bush is going to invade Iran before the end of the summer. That's about oil too.

[Bob Keith]

Puzzling that when I was in Iraq (that same Iraq that is all about oil) that my drivers had to buy their gas from mafia-boot-leg dealers along the dusty road. I suspected it came from Turkey and Iran.

Just another little iritating deviation in the "Iraq information paradigm."

But I digress...can anyone tell me what Miley Cyrus is up to these days? My black and white tube tv is on the blink. They tell me I am go'n to have to get some kind of converter.

Bob Keith
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