The Bush
administration has arrogated powers to itself that the
British people even refused to grant King George III at the
time of the Revolutionary War, an eminent political
scientist says.
“No executive in the history of the
Anglo-American world since the Civil War in England in the
17th century has laid claim to such broad power,” said
David Adler, a prolific author of articles on the U.S.
Constitution. “George Bush has exceeded the claims of
Oliver Cromwell who anointed himself Lord Protector of
England.”
Adler, a professor of political science at
Idaho State University at Pocatello, is the author of “The
Constitution and the Termination of Treaties”(Taylor &
Francis), among other books, and some 100 scholarly articles
in his field. Adler made his comments comparing the powers
of President Bush and King George III at a conference on
“Presidential Power in America” at the Massachusetts
School of Law, Andover, April 26th.
Adler said, Bush has
“claimed the authority to suspend the Geneva Convention,
to terminate treaties, to seize American citizens from the
streets to detain them indefinitely without benefit of legal
counseling, without benefit of judicial review. He has
ordered a domestic surveillance program which violates the
statutory law of the United States as well as the Fourth
Amendment.”
Adler said the authors of the U.S.
Constitution wrote that the president “shall take care to
faithfully execute the laws of the land” because “the
king of England possessed a suspending power” to set aside
laws with which he disagreed, “the very same kind of power
that the Bush Administration has claimed.”
Former
Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, Adler said, repeatedly
referred to the President’s “override” authority,
“which effectively meant that the Bush Administration was
claiming on behalf of President Bush a power that the
English people themselves had rejected by the time of the
framing of the Constitution.”
Adler said the Framers
sought an “Administrator in Chief” that would execute
the will of Congress and the Framers understood that the
President, as Commander-in-Chief “was subordinate to
Congress.” The very C-in-C concept, the historian said,
derived from the British, who conferred it on one of their
battlefield commanders in a war on Scotland in 1639 and it
“did not carry with it the power over war and peace” or
“authority to conduct foreign policy or to formulate
foreign policy.”
That the C-in-C was subordinate to the
will of Congress was demonstrated in the Revolutionary War
when George Washington, granted that title by Congress,
“was ordered punctually to respond to instructions and
directions by Congress and the dutiful Washington did
that,” Adler said.
Adler said that John Yoo, formerly
of the Office of Legal Counsel, wrote in 2003 that the
President as C-in-C could authorize the CIA or other
intelligence agencies to resort to torture to extract
information from suspects based on his authority. However,
Adler said, the U.S. Supreme Court in 1804 in Little vs.
Barreme affirmed the President is duty-bound to obey
statutory instructions and reaffirmed opinion two years
later in United States vs. Smith.
“In these last
eight years,” Adler said, “we have seen presidential
powers soar beyond the confines of the Constitution. We have
understood that his presidency bears no resemblance to the
Office created by the Framers… This is the time for us to
demand a return to the constitutional presidency. If we
don’t, we will have only ourselves to blame as we go
marching into the next war as we witness even greater claims
of presidential power.”
The Massachusetts School of Law
is a non-profit educational institution purposefully
dedicated to providing an affordable, quality legal
education to minorities, immigrants, and students from
economic backgrounds that would not otherwise be able to
afford to attend law school and enter the legal
profession.
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