Executive Powers

by Laura Snedeker

If President Bush has his way, there won’t be any C-SPAN broadcast of the Senate Judiciary Committee grilling White House aides on the firing of eight U.S. attorneys. There won’t be any grilling at all, just a few polite questions – not under oath, of course, and certainly not transcribed – as to whether the Bush administration pursued a policy of punishing lawyers who were not “loyal Bushies.”

Once again, the issue is less about specific actions taken by the administration and more about the scope of the executive branch’s powers. To be specific, at issue: the executive branch’s power to fire people based on their degree of loyalty to the president and the executive branch’s power to control the Congress.

The White House fully intends to refuse the committee’s subpoenas of Karl Rove, Harriet Miers, and William Kelley, despite the threat of “contempt of Congress” charges. (For more on the status of Congressional hearings, check the latest on NPR.) Minister of Information Tony Snow indignantly called the White House’s offer “extraordinarily generous,” implying that the executive branch is providing a complementary service to an inferior branch of government.

In the inside-out world of the Bush administration, the White House only has to comply with Congress when it feels like it. If the president wants to enact a loyalty program for government employees, that’s his right. How dare all those other branches of government get their sticky paws in the cookie jar of power?

There’s another legal controversy brewing halfway around the world in Pakistan. Pakistan is home to our good friend and ally General Pervez Musharraf, Supreme Court Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry, and several hundred very irate lawyers.

Musharraf suspended Chaudhry over secret allegations and Pakistani police have violently raided the offices of attorneys. As in the United States, the question is larger than whether or not Musharraf was right to suspend the judge. Does the executive branch have the right to unilaterally make decisions for which only pathetic explanations are offered? Or does it have a responsibility to answer to the people?

I’m not saying that the Bush administration’s actions are equivalent to the brutality of the Pakistani government. But there are disturbing patterns and similarities in authoritarianism. President Bush doesn’t have Musharraf’s unfettered power, but their attitudes are the same. The difference between the two leaders is the magnitude of their power, not their lack of commitment to democracy.

We’ve seen the slow erosion of democratic principles in the United States. That this isn’t the first White House to bend the rules a bit speaks to the stability of our democracy. How long can it last against attrition by authoritarian-minded leaders and apathy by a disinterested populace? We’re not going to wake up tomorrow or next week or even five years from now and find ourselves living in a totalitarian society. But members of Congress have noticed, corruption becomes entrenched in the political system, each successive leader bending the rules just a bit more and building on the advances of his predecessor.

The entrenchment and normalization of corruption as a way of life is subtle. It arrives not with a scowl and an AK-47, but in a distinguished business suit with a firm handshake. It is respectable. But it is dangerous, nevertheless.

(White House photo of Gen. Musharraf and President Bush by Susan Sterner; the photo is in the public domain.)

politics
George Bush
Pervez Musharraf
attorney scandal
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