“The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.”

- Article II, Section I
Constitution of the United States

Three branches of government are created by The Constitution of the United States.   The Legislative Branch, composed of the House of Representatives and the Senate, is established in Article 1.   The Executive, composed of the President, Vice-President and the various executive Departments, is established in Article 2.   The Judiciary, composed of the federal courts and the Supreme Court, is established in Article 3.

This Separation of Powers was devised by the framers of The Constitution for one primary purpose: to prevent any one individual or one majority from establishing a despotic rule.   Based on their experience, primarily as subjects of the tyrant King George III of England, the framers shied away from allowing any single branch of the new government too much power.  This separation of powers provides a system of shared power known as Checks and Balances.

Under the established separation of powers, each of the three branches of our government has certain powers, and each of these powers is limited, or checked, by one, or both, of the other branches.   Some examples of checks and balances are:

• The President appoints judges and departmental secretaries (Secretaries of State, Defense, etc.), but these appointments must be approved by the Senate.
• The Congress can pass a law, but the President can veto it or the Supreme Court can rule it to be unconstitutional.
• The Supreme Court can rule a law to be unconstitutional, but the Congress, together with the States, can amend The Constitution.

That these checks and balances introduce a level of inefficiency into our government is by design rather than by accident.   By forcing each branch of the government to be accountable to the others, no one branch can, in theory, usurp enough power to become dominant.

The Constitution grants the following powers to the Executive:

• veto power over all bills;
• appointment of judges and other officials;
• power to make treaties (which must then be ratified by Congress);
• ensure all laws are carried out;
• Commander-In-Chief of the military;
• power to grant pardons.

Until the Bush Administration, the natural push-pull between the Executive and Legislative branches in the struggle for power, together with the occasional Supreme Court ruling, had pretty much resulted in our system of checks and balances working as the founders planned.   But when the horrific events of 9/11 occurred, the Bush administration seized upon the subsequent fear running through the populace to advance an agenda that had long been the goal of Vice-President Dick Cheney - the expansion of the supremacy of the Executive branch of government.

As Gerald Ford’s Chief of Staff, Cheney had backed largely losing arguments on executive authority.   He resisted the limits set by Congress after the Watergate scandal and the Church Committee’s revelations of CIA abuse; he spoke against Congress’ override of Ford’s veto of amendments strengthening the Freedom of Information Act; he opposed the limits on eavesdropping set by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act; and he characterized the War Powers Act of 1973 as unconstitutional.

When Cheney left the White House at the end of the Ford administration, he referred to it as “the low point” of presidential authority.  Speaking at an American Enterprise Institute conference in December of 1983, Cheney commented that Congress is “all too often swayed by the public opinion of the moment” and is incapable of making the swift decisions required in “a dangerous and hostile world.”

Cheney espoused the view that simply by creating a defense establishment, Congress had “already given prior approval” for any presidential decision on where and how to make war.  ”We have appropriated the funds and raised the army and purchased the equipment and built the missiles and the bombers, and the president has the authority to make decisions about how to use those things,” he said.

Shortly before he became vice president, at a 2000 conference about White House chiefs-of-staff, Cheney declared that even as “a congressman, I found that I was still very much taken with the notion, the preeminence, if you will, of the president” in foreign policy and defense.

When the Reagan administration’s secret maneuvering to circumvent congressional bans on trading with Iran and funding Nicaraguan rebels known as Contras came to light, an independent counsel indicted three top officials, including National Security Adviser John M. Poindexter.  Following the indictments, a special congressional committee of Congress concluded that the Reagan White House had subverted The Constitution.

Cheney, who was then serving in Congress, was among the principal authors of a blistering dissent.   According to the dissenting report, the issue was not that the White House had broken the law, but that Congress had tried to constrain the commander-in-chief.   Even if Reagan’s secret decisions to sell prohibited arms to Iran and funnel the proceeds to Nicaragua’s Contra rebels were not always wise, according to the minority report, they “were constitutionally protected exercises of inherent Presidential powers.”

According to David Gergen, who worked with Cheney during the Ford years, Cheney’s “zealous reassertion of the power of the presidency” during the Bush administration is completely consistent with the views he expressed long ago.   “He felt that what had become known as the imperial presidency during Nixon had become the imperiled presidency,” Gergen said.  Gergen went on to say that many who agreed with Cheney during the Ford administration believed that “through Reagan, those powers had been substantially restored.”

Cheney, apparently, did not feel the same, and the events of 9/11 provided him with the background he needed to play puppet master.   Playing on the American public’s fear of terrorism and utilizing the resources of the Whitehouse’s Office of Legal Council to provide specious legal arguments supporting the supremacy of the Executive, Cheney was able to manipulate Bush into issuing executive orders and keeping secret information from Congress while enacting illegal policies that resulted in the commission of war crimes by the United States.  Cheney and Bush also bullied the then-Republican Congress into abdicating its responsibilities under the system of checks and balances so that they had virtual free reign to run amuck.

The results of Cheney’s machinations have led to

• lying by the Executive to both the Congress and to U.S. citizens
• torturing foreign nationals
• suspension of habeas corpus for some U.S. citizens
• extraordinary rendition
• the illegal invasion of a sovereign nation
• displacement of over two million innocent Iraqi civilians
• the privatization of a war in which military contractors, who often have no accountability to anyone, have stolen and wasted billions of dollars, and kidnapped, raped and murdered in the name of the United States
• extensive illegal wiretapping of U.S. citizens
• the claim by President Bush, through signing statements, of the authority to disobey more than 750 laws passed by Congress and signed by Bush
• the U.S. Attorneys’ Scandal

While George W. Bush bears the ultimate responsibility for the atrocities committed during his administration, there is a substantial body of evidence that Dick Cheney, in his quest to establish presidential supremacy, was the mastermind behind much of what has happened.

One of the most important tasks facing Barack Obama is the restoration of our system of checks and balances by returning to the Constitutional limits on presidential authority.

In order to restore the Presidency to its rightful place of leadership and moral certitude, we need  -

• A president who understands The Constitution and realizes that since Article II doesn’t give us an overly elaborate description of what the presidency should be, he will need to check himself, understanding that his powers are immense but not boundless.   The powers granted him are not there for either exploitation or abuse.
• A president who appreciates that he is the embodiment and caretaker, not the owner, of an institution in we see the best of our country and ourselves.
• A president who has the intellectual capacity that will help us dig out of the situation left us by the Bush administration.
• A president who is intellectually curious about the world around him - a president who neither thinks as an ideologue nor speaks in sound bites; who neither believes that issues are simply black and white, nor thinks as if they are.
• A president who recognizes that he doesn’t know everything, and, knowing this, surrounds himself with people, from both sides of the aisle and from opposing viewpoints, who can help fill in the gaps.
• A president we can “laugh with” instead of one we “laugh at.”
• A president who does not belong to the Flat Earth Society and who will restore the scientific body of knowledge to its rightful place in solving such significant problems as global warming, energy issues and world hunger.
• A president who has a heart and believes we have yet to achieve all we can be.
• A president who has convictions but who does not arbitrarily convert those convictions to knee-jerk decisions and is capable of changing his mind.
• A president who believes that spending on education and healthcare will provide a higher long term return on investment than will spending on more wars.
• A president who has faith but who understands the importance of separation of church and state; one who knows that our country was not founded on Christianity but on religious tolerance.
• A president who will not turn over his job to the vice president (except when required for medical purposes), and who will not yield the moral high ground simply because taking the low road is easier.
• A president who knows that the true measure of ourselves is not our “purple mountains majesty,” our “amber waves of grain” or our steel buildings standing at attention, but who we are on the inside.  That who we are on the inside will be how we are viewed beyond our shores.
• A president who can continue to inspire and electrify as well as remind us that even in our darkest hours we still have much in which to believe.

Most of all, we need a president who, after taking the oath 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,” goes about the business of doing so in a manner worthy of his office.