Recession? What recession? The Bushes Buy Fine China for almost 1/2 a mil.

[KSigkid]

Originally Posted by DaemonSeid

True and quite honestly, I felt that way with the last admin especially with the wiretapping and Gitmo that were were on our way to losing some rights because the admin just stepped over our rights...some consolidation and more accountability is needed yes, but not at the expense of giving one branch too much power.

Hey...care to make a new thread of this or are u good right here?

I'm fine with discussing it right here - if people have complaints we can break it off into another thread.

While we may not agree on some of the results, I agree with your general point. If the executive branch is too powerful, it's going to exert too much influence on other agencies and branches; for example, in the examples you cited, opinions were requested from the OLC (Office of Legal Counsel, a branch of the DOJ) on the legality of various activities.

Now, the attorneys in the OLC are extremely intelligent, the cream of the law school and clerkship crop. But, there's a question of whether the executive branch was exerting any influence on those attorneys, thus affecting the opinions given by OLC attorneys (like the opinions done by Yoo and Bybee, for example). You can see the problem - otherwise brilliant people, influenced by pressure, use their intelligence to put out a memo that starts with the conclusion and works backward in the reasoning. The reasoning isn't great, but it's passed along to people who take it as gospel truth (because, usually, those OLC opinions effectively become the law).

I think that's where a big part of the problem comes in, and it's happened other times in history. You look at Lincoln and Roosevelt, and they took executive power to new heights; not everything they did was positive, but they've been lauded in the history books. You look at Nixon, and it's worked the other way; who knows how it will work with Bush.

I honestly don't know where President Obama will go with it, but my early sense is that he has an expansive view of the power of the executive branch.