Bush pictureIf you’re confused about the health of constitutional government in America these days, all you need to do is follow recent events in Washington. Here’s a quick sampling of headlines:

Cheney World’s Truly Unique Despot If I were a law student taking the bar exam (and not one of those worse-than-1st-year-students Cheneyites (h/t Selise) who write letters to D.C. judges), and there was a Constitutional law question about the limits of executive authority, do you think I’d get any credit for arguing that the Vice President is not subject to the laws that apply to the executive branch, especially when functioning as a shadow President? Probably not, but apparently David Addington, who gives our VP legal advice, thinks that argument will sell.

No Hitting on Jesus If a student attends a parade and holds up a banner that says, “Bong hits for Jesus,” do you think the student’s First Amendment rights to free speech would protect him from being punished by his school’s principal? Well, the Supreme Court, voting 6-3, just said “no; we know you’re advocating drug use and you don’t have that right.” The real reason? I suspect our mostly conservative Christian court was offended by a student associating assumed drug terms with Jesus. Do you honestly think that if the student’s banner had said, “Buddha makes me high,” any one would have cared?

Supremes: Okay for White House to Fund Right Wing Caliphate If Congress passed a statute that directed an agency to allocate monies to faith-based groups to carry out religious activities, do you think the Supreme Court should allow tax payers standing to sue to prevent violations of the 1st Amendment “establishment clause” that prevents the government from supporting religion? Well, almost 40 years ago, a more honorable Supreme Court said “yes, tax payers can sue” in Flast v. Cohen, because there’s no other effective way for Americans to ensure their government doesn’t start drifting towards a theocracy. But what if, forty years later, Congress passed general appropriations for the White House, and the White House set up an office that used those monies to pay off faith based organizations for the same activities? — well the Court’s 5-4 conservative religious majority just said, “No Problem,” and “you can’t sue to stop it,” while claiming that they weren’t really overturning the 40 year old precedent. Hello, Iran, and thank you Gang of 14.

CIA: “If You Think This Was Bad, Wait Till You Find Out What We’re Doing Now” I suppose it’s a good thing that the CIA released its no-longer secret “Family Ghouls” from 35 years ago, admitting how it plotted to assassinate foreign leaders, overthrow governments and illegally spied on ordinary Americans. But it’s a real bummer when you realize that what our government is doing today is likely just as bad or worse, and they’re still denying that.

Bush Not Told Cheney Replaced Him Suppose you’re President of the United States, and your Vice President does every thing he can to usurp your authority, mislead and cut out your cabinet officers, places moles and VP loyalists in every executive entity/agency to make sure you never get direct advice from anyone without the Vice President knowing about it first and, as emptywheel notes, uses every means he can as a “gatekeeping device to direct Bush to make the choices Cheney supports.” Would you tolerate it for one minute? Well, if you’re an incompetent, clueless idiot, you would.

Cheney Slaughters 77,000 Salmon In the WaPo’s fourth article in its series, “Who’s Your Daddy,” they reveal that the Vice President used the executive’s power to intervene in government agencies like EPA or Department of Interior to undermine laws to protect the environment and the nation’s resources, and then when the interventions resulted in policy failures or were struck down by the courts, he got the agency heads fired and covered up his interventions. A regular Mr. Courageous. [Update: emptywheel has an excellent must-read analysis of the 4th WaPo article, read together with another piece from Rolling Stone.]

Bush Found In Iraq Spider Hole Playing With Firecracker We all know the VP’s cabal encouraged the President to engage in a war on false pretenses, got 150,000 of our troops bogged down in the Middle East with no acceptable way out, got 3500 of them killed and another 26,000 wounded. And we knew the Vice President got the President to sign, without the knowledge of the Attorney General or the Secretary of State or the National Security Adviser, orders that authorized torture, kidnapping and indefinite detention measures that caused universal condemnation, became a disgrace for America, and made virtually unlimited claims of executive power that got repeatedly knocked down by even the nation’s conservative courts. So you think Congress will just sit back and not even consider using the constitutional mechanism designed by the Founders to deal with such outrageous misconduct in office? Well . . . ?

Cheney Establishes Royal Blood Line But this one takes the cake. As Christy noted, emptywheel has figured out the line of shadow President succession, just in case Cheney decides to go even further underground.

This is not America any more, my friends. Not even close. It’s a country that’s gone mad, lost its moral compass, and lost all sense of self respect. But maybe there’s hope . . .

The first step in getting our country back? Please make calls to restore habeas corpus:

1 (800) 828 – 0498
1 (800) 459 – 1887
1 (800) 614 – 2803
1 (866) 340 – 9281
1 (866) 338 – 1015
1 (877) 851 – 6437

Photo: Bush discussing immigration: Larry Dowling/Reuters.

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