Red herring...
Posted on 06/15/2009 12:28:16 PM PDT by SJackson
Last week President Obama appointed yet another “czar” with massive government power, answering only to him. Even before this latest appointment, the top-ranking Democrat in the Senate wrote President Obama a letter saying that these czars are unconstitutional. President Obama’s “czar strategy” is an unprecedented power grab centralizing authority in the White House, outside congressional oversight and in violation of the Constitution.
As of last week, Czar Kenneth Feinberg has the authority to set the pay scale for executives at any company receiving government money (and how many aren’t, these days?). Czar Feinberg has the power to say that someone’s pay is excessive, and to make companies cut that pay until the czar is pleased.
Congress did not give Czar Feinberg this authority. For that matter, Congress has not authorized any of the czars that President Barack Obama has created. Over the past thirty years presidents have each had one or two czars for various issues, and once the number went as high as five. But now, by some counts President Obama has created sixteen czars, and there may be more on the way. Each of these has enormous government power, and answers only to the president.
Ever since this practice of appointing czars began years ago, it has always been considered possible that they are all unconstitutional. But it never built to a critical mass to elicit a court fight. These czars were few and far between, and rarely did anything that seriously ruffled any feathers. But President Obama has taken this to an unprecedented level, to the point where these appointments are dangerous to our constitutional regime.
This has become too much for the longest-serving senator in U.S. history to stomach. Democratic Senator Robert Byrd is the president pro tempore of the U.S. Senate. Even though Senate rules vest most powers in the Senate majority leader, the president pro tempore is a constitutional officer, and third in line to the U.S. presidency (after the vice president and the Speaker of the House). This office is held by a Democrat, who has been serving in the Senate since before Barack Obama was even born.
Senator Byrd wrote a letter to President Obama in February, criticizing the president’s strategy of creating czars to manage important areas of national policy. Senator Byrd said that these appointments violate both the constitutional system of checks and balances and the constitutional separation of powers, and is a clear attempt to evade congressional oversight. (Didn’t this White House promise unprecedented transparency?)
And Senator Byrd is exactly correct. The Constitution commands that government officers with significant authority (called “principal officers”) are nominated by the president but then are subject to a confirmation vote by the U.S. Senate. And principal officers include not only cabinet-level department heads, but go five levels deep in executive appointments, to include assistant secretaries and deputy undersecretaries.
Inferior officers are appointed either by the president, cabinet-level officers, or the courts. But even then, the Constitution specifies that only Congress can authorize the making of such appointments. For these inferior officers, only Congress can create their offices, and also specify who appoints them. And such officers are still answerable to Congress. They are subject to subpoena to testify before Congress, and Congress holds the power of the purse by making annual appropriations for their division or program.
White House officials, by contrast, cannot be compelled to appear before Congress and testify. They are alter-egos of the president himself, and as an agent of the Executive Office of the President they are entirely removed from Congress, and not answerable to Congress in any way. That was why during the Bush administration White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten, Senior Advisor Karl Rove, and Counsel Harriet Miers could not be compelled to testify to Congress when President Bush invoked executive privilege (a battle they may well have won if they pressed their case all the way to the Supreme Court). Senior presidential aides advise the president alone, and the separation of powers forbids congressional interference in that relationship.
But that’s the problem with these czars. The president can have any advisors he wants, people who privately advise him or meet with others on his behalf, but have little or no actual authority to exert government power on anyone. These czars, however, are directly dictating policy, impacting millions of lives in the way that few assistant secretaries or deputy undersecretaries do.
The Founding Fathers specifically wrote the Constitution in a way to deny such absolute power to emanate from one person. That was why they required that no principal officers could exercise any power unless the U.S. Senate decided to confirm them. That was also why they specified that even for inferior officers only Congress could create their positions and could still require them to answer to Congress. The Founding Fathers were specifically blocking the type of centralized power that President Obama is currently exerting.
Fortunately, there is a remedy. Any person on the receiving end of an order from any of these czars has standing to challenge their constitutionality in court. Any person whose pay is deemed excessive by Kenneth Feinberg, or affected by any other czar, could file a federal suit asserting that the order is an unconstitutional exercise of government power, and have a court both invalidate the order and hold that the position itself doesn’t legally exist. Then everyone could just ignore these czars, because they would simply be private citizens, without the authority to order any of us to tie our shoes.
Let the lawsuits begin.
Stepping back a bit, one gets the worry that as Mister Obama operates farther and farther from our laws and traditions, signs of entropy and chaos are already visible from his (alleged} administration.
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Byrd occasionally gets it right. On those rare occasions I call his office and thank him.
I am not a defender of Senator Byrd, but I do revere the constitution as I have read he says he does.
—
http://www.princeton.edu/~snkatz/papers/snkatzConstitution.pdf
(note- article critical of Byrd but credits him with respect for the Constitution)
“In his 2006 Constitution Day message Senator Byrd reminded us that he carries a copy of the document with him “wherever I go,” and asked “but what about you? What do you know about the Constitution? How much of it do you carry around with you? Why should you want to know about your Constitution?”xxviii His answer was to refer to Ben Franklin, who reminded the Framers that they had created a “Republic, if you can keep it.”xxix And adhering to the structures and values of the Constitution, he argued, is the way to preserve the republic.
Our Constitution embodies the vision of the Framers, their dream of freedom, supported by the genius of practical structure which has come to be known as the checks and balances and separation of powers. But we cannot defend and protect this dream if we are ignorant of the Constitution’s history and how it works. Ignorance is ultimately the worst enemy of a people who want to be free.xxx
Education is then, for Byrd, the key to the preservation of the republic, historical training is the key to education, and understanding of the Founding Era is the key to United States history.”
ZERO has probably already done as much as he is going to do in response to Byrd’s letter ...the same as he did with the previous letter the old man sent to the whitey house ...IGNORE IT.
From my recollection the last letter Byrd sent to the whitey house was about the ZERO once again overstepping his bounds and doing things the Senate and House should control ...he didn’t even dignify the letter with an acknowledgment according to accounts I have read.
0bama has been trampling the Constitution since his college days, and has not changed his stripes at this point. He has no allegiance to the accumulated history of this venerable republic, and no allegiance to the laws he swore to uphold. He is ineligible to hold the office he occupies and is perpetrating on the American people the greatest political fraud in our nation’s history.
Yet, through it all, he is still slogging toward the marxist abyss and dragging the US with him.
The fact that he is using ‘czars’ outside of the Constitution should surprise no one. He is above the law. Just ask him.
It’s time to take back the country.
***Congress did not give Czar Feinberg this authority.***
And it would be Constitutional if Congress had?
***These czars were few and far between, and rarely did anything that seriously ruffled any feathers. But President Obama has taken this to an unprecedented level, to the point where these appointments are dangerous to our constitutional regime.***
So it’s okay to be a little unconstitutional, but not a lot unconstitutional. Got it.
If I were a CEO, and the board voted me “X” dollars in compensation but the CZAR said, “Nope, you can only have “Y” dollars, I would tell him to piss up a rope and then see how much power he actually had.
It would surely end up in the SCOTUS front yard for adjudication. And if “all” the boards and CEO’s said the same thing, then you have effectively neutered the CZAR.
He can say “sheet happens”..
This phony figurehead TOTUS term is nothing but a scam, the voters bought his entire line of lies and BS and we are now seeing the results.
But take heart, the rocket he is riding skyward is about to run out of fuel and the sharks are sensing blood in the water. The elected official who support him now will be the same ones who will turn on him as more blood drips onto the water, if not the election will be a blood bath for them also. Not likely to happen, his term has a limit of eight years and theirs is open ended.
Obamalini is turning into a dictator.
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A local grocery - not big box - store had an Obama speech playing on a flat screen the other day. It was a replay; may have been CNN. No more of that store for me.
Red herring...
one would think that our pubie opposition party would do something about this.
It's official: Obama creates more czars than the Romanovs
These stories are just writing themselves, in disbelief.
There is a link at google search claiming 21 total czars, but due to IT security I cannot access it. Maybe someone else can post the list.
excerpt from the Romanov article (slightly formatted)...
In addition to Bersin, we have
energy czar Carol Browner,
urban czar Adolfo Carrion, Jr.,
infotech czar Vivek Kundra,
faith-based czar Joshua DuBois,
health reform czar Nancy-Ann DeParle,
new TARP czar Herb Allison,
stimulus accountability czar Earl Devaney,
non-proliferation czar Gary Samore,
terrorism czar John Brennan,
regulatory czar Cass Sunstein,
drug czar Gil Kerlikowske,
and Guantanamo closure czar Daniel Fried.
We also have a host of special envoys that fall into the czar category including
AfPak special envoy Richard Holbrooke,
Mideast peace envoy George Mitchell,
special advisor for the Persian Gulf and Southwest Asia Dennis Ross,
Sudan special envoy J. Scott Gration
and climate special envoy Todd Stern.
BTW...
Bersin is the border czar
If I were a CEO, and the board voted me “X” dollars in compensation but the CZAR said, “Nope, you can only have “Y” dollars, I would tell him to piss up a rope and then see how much power he actually had.
It would surely end up in the SCOTUS front yard for adjudication. And if “all” the boards and CEO’s said the same thing, then you have effectively neutered the CZAR.”
I want to neiter the King, also, please.
Find his birth certificate and get him declared not eligible in the first place.
If I were a CEO, and the board voted me “X” dollars in compensation but the CZAR said, “Nope, you can only have “Y” dollars, I would tell him to piss up a rope and then see how much power he actually had.
It would surely end up in the SCOTUS front yard for adjudication. And if “all” the boards and CEO’s said the same thing, then you have effectively neutered the CZAR.”
I want to neuter the King, also, please.
Find his birth certificate and get him declared not eligible in the first place.
Our crumbling Republic has begun to free-fall. America will survive somehow, but we will be either a socialist or fascist state by the time I am dead. Right now I am leaning toward fascism.
It’s official: Obama creates more czars than the Romanovs
It has finally happened. With yesterday’s naming of Border Czar Alan Bersin, the Obama administration has by any reasonable reckoning passed the Romanov Dynasty in the production of czars. The Romanovs ruled Russia from 1613 with the ascension of Michael I through the abdication of Czar Nicholas II in 1917. During that time, they produced 18 czars. While it is harder to exactly count the number of Obama administration czars, with yesterday’s appointment it seems fair to say it is now certainly in excess of 18.
In addition to Bersin, we have energy czar Carol Browner, urban czar Adolfo Carrion, Jr., infotech czar Vivek Kundra, faith-based czar Joshua DuBois, health reform czar Nancy-Ann DeParle, new TARP czar Herb Allison, stimulus accountability czar Earl Devaney, non-proliferation czar Gary Samore, terrorism czar John Brennan, regulatory czar Cass Sunstein, drug czar Gil Kerlikowske, and Guantanamo closure czar Daniel Fried. We also have a host of special envoys that fall into the czar category including AfPak special envoy Richard Holbrooke, Mideast peace envoy George Mitchell, special advisor for the Persian Gulf and Southwest Asia Dennis Ross, Sudan special envoy J. Scott Gration and climate special envoy Todd Stern. That’s 18.
This is a very conservative estimate, however. I will allow you to pick whom you would like out of the remaining candidates. For example you could count de facto car czar Steve Rattner even though the administration went out of its way to say they weren’t going to have a car czar... before he ultimately emerged as the car czar. You could count National Director of Intelligence Dennis Blair, often referred to as the intelligence czar, although you might not want to because his job has a different kind of status on the org chart. I’m not going to count Paul Volcker who was referred to as Obama’s economic czar because Obama is not making much use of Volcker (at least according to reports).
But you certainly might want to count people deemed by the media to be the “cyber security czar” or the “AIDs czar” or the “green jobs czar” even if there are reasons to quibble about the designation of one or two of them. I also won’t count Michelle Malkin’s designation of White House science advisor John Holdren as “weather czar” because as a matter of principle I won’t count anything that horrifying woman does. Nonetheless you could certainly call the talented Holdren the nation’s science “czar” without stretching things.
The point is, disqualify who you may for your own list, there are still plenty of czars on the bench who will step up to make the comparison work in favor of Team Obama, if you think have lots and lots of czars is actually something in favor of Team Obama. (And to be fair: they didn’t create all these slots...just a lot of them.)
Personally, I think from a purely process standpoint all this czarism is a risky business that ends up producing bureaucratic bottlenecks, tensions and inefficiency when not managed extremely carefully. For now we will give them the benefit of the doubt that they will manage it well. Though please, please guys, stop now that you are ahead, now that you are officially the most prolific czarist dynasty in history.
For the record, the czars produced by Team Romanov were: Michael I, Alexis I, Fyodor III, Ivan V, Peter the Great, Catherine I, Peter II, Anna, Elizabeth, Peter III, Ivan VI, Catherine the Great, Paul I, Alexander I, Nicholas I, Alexander II, Alexander III, Nicholas II. For the purposes of giving the Russians an even chance against the president, I am including both the original Romanov line and the descendants of the Holstein-Gottorps, who kept the Romanov name. I am not including the regency of Sophia, although if you want, go ahead. Our team still wins. (Although, I’ll admit it, it is almost as hard of tracking the Russian succession as it is the structure of our own government these days.)
For all his very many faults, Byrd is a ferocious defender of the rights, powers, and obligations of the United States Senate. By using these czars the haloed one is doing exactly as Byrd claims. Sidestepping Senate confirmation process, avoiding the need to report to the Congress, and most importantly, flagrantly disregarding both the separation of power and checks and balances. But then the Constitution is in the haloed one’s opinion “a flawed document.” One man rule is so much more efficient.
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