TARP, President Bush, and the Constitution

Can I just stop calling it TARP? The Troubled Assets Relief Program, as it was originally called, shall henceforth be known as PERP, the Presidential End-Run Program. As in, President Bush didn't like Congress' decision on the auto-bailout, so he did an end-run around the entire legislative branch and did what he darn well pleased. After all, he's the executive.

Well, Mr. President, let me tell you about the Executive Office, and the powers it holds.

The President of The United States of America is bound by the Constitution to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed". The Presidential Oath requires the would-be president to swear to "faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.''

Nowhere does the Constitution enable the President to circumvent the will of Congress, save by veto. As Congress never passed an auto bailout bill, there was nothing for President Bush to veto, or to send back to Congress. He simply saw something that he did not like, and dismissed the objections of the elected representatives of the citizens of this country. He took a law marginally related to what he wanted to do (TARP/PERP), and made it do what he wanted, contrary to the expressed will of Congress, American citizens, and the wording of the bill itself. No fanfare, no rationalizations of the illegality/unconstitutionality of what he was doing. No justifications of how this was "faithfully upholding the law". Just a few penstrokes, and a quick press conference.

Great. Peachy. One can only imagine what horrors this could be the precedent for.

There's a reason that the Constitution balances the executive and legislative branches. There's a reason that laws must be approved by both Congress and the President. But now, according to President Bush, the entire legislative branch and the Constitution can be bypassed at the will of the Executive.

Just great.

I am indebted to George Will's article on this subject in the Washington Post.

UPDATE: I just finished reading the Will article all the way through (I had only seen a couple paragraphs before), and I note that a lot of this post makes the same points as Will's article. I could say something to effect of "great minds think alike", but that would be somewhat egotistical, don't you think? So I'll simply say that Will's article is great, and deserves a thorough reading through, as I should have done before I wrote this. That said, this is my material, not copied or paraphrased from Will's. He did give me a great idea, however.

Hey!

Tigerhawk linked to me-- Christmas has come early in Ithilien!

Moving on, you remember those end of the world posts? Well, it could be worse.

I could live in Britain, where enforcers from debt collection agencies have been given the go ahead to break into people's homes, pin the homeowners down, and ransack the home for belongings to appropriate to pay down the debt.

Don't worry though. They say they'll regulate it. Besides, these new powers "will not be used to search debtors’ pockets or to remove jewellery." So if you're into carrying everything of value on your person, you might be safe from these people, who, despite the word "bailiff", are not police.

Of course, Britons may wish to give their pockets snap and velcro closures, as things could fall out when the enforcers breaks into their home and tackles them. And they might want to ask national icon Doctor Who just who he gets his jackets from, as the pockets are bigger on the inside than they are on the outside.

Another link up

This time it's On Tap, a nifty blog written by the guy who writes NRO's Campaign Spot and a few other guys whom I have never heard of, but I'm pretty sure I should have. Truly good stuff, funny, and a thoroughly interesting series going on right now called the On Tap Awards.

Housekeeping

People who look at my link sidebar (all .75 of you) will notice that Jac has been removed. Is there still good stuff on Jac? Yes. Do I object to being called a prostitute by the author simply because I'm a stay-at-home mom? And do I object enough to avoid the blog?

Also yes.

Anyway, Jac has been replaced by Althouse (his mother, coincidentally). I've been planning to add Althouse to the list for quite a while. Occasional bizarre and Not Entirely Safe for Work posts, but usually good stuff from a center-left point of view. If you're concerned about NSFW-ness, avoid the comments in certain posts (her recent one on tattoos, for example. Yikes!).

It's the end of the world as we know it, Part Three

A ten-year-old boy has been arrested, and charged with terrorism, for bringing a cap gun on a school bus, and later not having put his toy down before he answered the door. Actually, truly charged, and facing imprisonment if convicted.

The kid wants to be a police officer when he grows up.

This should make every single parent sick. And angry.

All links for "It's the end of the world as we know it" parts one through three were found on The Corner. You should go and read it.

It's the end of the world as we know it, Part Two

God is being airbrushed from American history-- at the Capitol Visitor's Center. As in, the Capitol Building of the United States of America. Edited out of our national motto, the rostrum of the Speaker of the House, the Northwest Ordinance, and the Constitution.

There's nothing left for me to say about this... well, no, there's two things. The first one is that, while I'm rarely alarmist about the whole "war on Christianity" thing, I will say that this is despicable, and that you should read the article for full effect. The second thing is that nowhere in the Constitution are people granted a right against being offended.

Unless that's been "edited" too.

It's the end of the world as we know it, Part One

Occasionally, any rational person will wonder, if only briefly, if civilization is dying.

Today is one of those days.

Every so often the Oxford University Press revises its children's dictionary and puts out a new version. All well and good. Until you look at what they've taken out, and what they've added:

Words taken out:

Carol, cracker, holly, ivy, mistletoe

Dwarf, elf, goblin

Abbey, aisle, altar, bishop, chapel, christen, disciple, minister, monastery, monk, nun, nunnery, parish, pew, psalm, pulpit, saint, sin, devil, vicar

Coronation, duchess, duke, emperor, empire, monarch, decade

adder, ass, beaver, boar, budgerigar, bullock, cheetah, colt, corgi, cygnet, doe, drake, ferret, gerbil, goldfish, guinea pig, hamster, heron, herring, kingfisher, lark, leopard, lobster, magpie, minnow, mussel, newt, otter, ox, oyster, panther, pelican, piglet, plaice, poodle, porcupine, porpoise, raven, spaniel, starling, stoat, stork, terrapin, thrush, weasel, wren.

Acorn, allotment, almond, apricot, ash, bacon, beech, beetroot, blackberry, blacksmith, bloom, bluebell, bramble, bran, bray, bridle, brook, buttercup, canary, canter, carnation, catkin, cauliflower, chestnut, clover, conker, county, cowslip, crocus, dandelion, diesel, fern, fungus, gooseberry, gorse, hazel, hazelnut, heather, holly, horse chestnut, ivy, lavender, leek, liquorice, manger, marzipan, melon, minnow, mint, nectar, nectarine, oats, pansy, parsnip, pasture, poppy, porridge, poultry, primrose, prune, radish, rhubarb, sheaf, spinach, sycamore, tulip, turnip, vine, violet, walnut, willow

Words put in:

Blog, broadband, MP3 player, voicemail, attachment, database, export, chatroom, bullet point, cut and paste, analogue

Celebrity, tolerant, vandalism, negotiate, interdependent, creep, citizenship, childhood, conflict, common sense, debate, EU, drought, brainy, boisterous, cautionary tale, bilingual, bungee jumping, committee, compulsory, cope, democratic, allergic, biodegradable, emotion, dyslexic, donate, endangered, Euro

Apparatus, food chain, incisor, square number, trapezium, alliteration, colloquial, idiom, curriculum, classify, chronological, block graph

Sorry for the huge block, but you need to see the full list. To get the full effect, however, you need this quote from the Telegraph article: "The publisher claims the changes have been made to reflect the fact that Britain is a modern, multicultural, multifaith society."

Ah. I see. In order to placate all those non-Christians, references to Christmas (including the innocuous "cracker" will be deleted. In order to placate all those non-Britishers, references to the monarchy, the titular head of the United Kingdom and Canada, will also be deleted. Also references to every-day Christianity-- which happens to be the state religion (Anglicanism). But wait, we've already deleted Her Majesty, who is one of the heads of the Church of England, so deleting the Church is twice as easy! And, in order to be modern, we'll take out... well, plants and animals aren't interesting to children, so let's replace them with things like "tolerate", "MP3 player" (seriously, who needed a dictionary entry for that? One would think that "player" and a knowledge of the alphabet and the numbers 1-3 would have sufficed), and "biodegradable".

There's also this gem of a quote: "We are limited by how big the dictionary can be – little hands must be able to handle it...". I can only roll my eyes. How much bigger would the dictionary have been if they hadn't deleted some of those words? A page? Two, maybe, three? You'd need fifty pages before it made a difference to "little hands"-- which would work out to about three entries a page (there are 152 deleted words listed). This excuse is simply that-- an excuse.

Oh, also from that article of Roger Kimball's: apparently some American Muslims informed the Department of Homeland Security that while the word "progress" is acceptable, "liberty" is to be avoided. Why? Because it is a "buzzword for American hegemony".

Personally, I'm alright with liberty being a synonym for America.

Rod Dreher

Talented writer.
That said, he has officially flipped his lid. Dreher used to be a bona fide conservative-- ideas differ, of course, and I thought some of Dreher's were a little out there, but that was alright. I don't insist on ideological orthodoxy (can I say homodoxy?). He's drifted as the years have passed-- I first noticed the drift after the publication of his book Crunchy Cons, which I agreed with in some places and disagreed with in others.

This came out today-- hence my assertion that Dreher has lost it:

Today, the greatest threats to conservative interests come not from the Soviet Union or high taxes, but from too much individual freedom. Look around you: Americans have been poor stewards of our economic liberty, owing to cultural values that celebrate unfettered materialism. Our families and communities have fragmented, in part because we have embraced an ethic of extreme individualism. Climate change and a peak in oil production threaten our future because we have been irresponsible caretakers of the natural world and its resources. At best, the religious right stood ineffectively against these trends. At worst, we preached them, mistaking consumerism for conservatism.

Uh-huh . Because some people made poor use of their freedom, I have to much of it. Because some churches confused and conflated policy and doctrine, I, your standard American citizen, have too much liberty. Some people made choices that Mr. Dreher considers wrong-- strip individual freedom from all!

Unless Dreher is willing to punish this "excessive freedom" with jail (that is what is generally done to take away freedom in this country), he needs to rethink this idea. And if he is willing to take away people's freedom...

There has been a lot of discussion around the conservative blogosphere lately about booting various people out of the conservative tent-- Kathleen Parker, Christopher Buckley, etc. But there are some people, perhaps including Dreher, who are far more deserving of it.