Bush Changes the Rules when he wants!

Trust Bush and Paulson? I think NOT!

The FOX is managing the Chicken Coup!
Bush Changes the Rules
The Bush administration’s Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice has been issuing classified legal opinions about surveillance for several years. As a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) had access to DOJ opinions regarding presidential power and he had three declassified in order to show how the judicial branch has, in a bizarre and chilling way, assisted Bush in circumventing its own power.

According to the three memos:

1. “There is no constitutional requirement for a president to issue a new executive order whenever he wishes to depart from the terms of a previous executive order. Rather than violate an executive order, the president has instead modified or waived it;”

2. “The president, exercising his constitutional authority under Article II, can determine whether an action is a lawful exercise of the president’s authority under Article II,” and

3. “The Department of Justice is bound by the president’s legal determinations.”

Or, as Whitehouse rephrased them in a Dec. 7, 2007, Senate speech: “I don’t have to follow my own rules, and I don’t have to tell you when I’m breaking them. I get to determine what my own powers are. The Department of Justice doesn’t tell me what the law is. I tell the Department of Justice what the law is.”

The issue arose within the context of the Protect America Act, which expands government surveillance powers and gives telecom companies legal immunity for helping. Whitehouse called it, “a second-rate piece of legislation passed in a stampede in August at the behest of the Bush administration.” He pointed out that the act does not prohibit spying on Americans overseas—with the exception of an executive order that permits surveillance only of Americans the attorney general determines to be “agents of a foreign power.”

“In other words, the only thing standing between Americans traveling overseas and government wiretap is an executive order,” Whitehouse said in an April 12 speech. “An order by this president, under the first legal theory I cited, claims he has no legal obligation to obey.”

Whitehouse, a former U.S. attorney, legal counsel to Rhode Island’s governor, and Rhode Island attorney general who took Senate office in 2006, went on to point out that Marbury vs. Madison, written by Chief Justice John Marshall in 1803, established that it is “emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.”

Sources: “In FISA Speech, Whitehouse Sharply Criticizes Bush Administration’s Assertion of Executive Power,” Sheldon Whitehouse, Dec. 7, 2007; “Down the Rabbit Hole,” Marcy Wheeler, The Guardian U.K., Dec. 26, 2007.