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Friday, April 13, 2007

Dictatorship and the President as Strong Daddy
Posted by Jill | 6:30 AM
I have a very dear friend whom I regard as the Average American Voter. This is the mythical American soccer mom made flesh, except for the fact that her extremely well-adjusted and happy kids have benefitted from NOT having their every minute tightly scheduled and controlled by team sports, dance classes, music lessons, tae kwon do and Kumon. She's moderate in her political views, when she has them, which isn't often because as the mother of two children in a two-income family, she just doesn't have time. What she knows of current events is what she hears on Good Morning America while getting the kids and herself ready for school. She doesn't spend much time thinking about the state of the world or the war or the collapsing housing market, not because she's incurious or doesn't care, because she's just too damn busy.

Back during the Reagan years, however, she was that incurious. I remember explaining to her about checks and balances when she said, "I don't see why the president can't do whatever he wants."

There's a mindset that thinks the president should be able to do whatever he wants because of a profound lack of understanding of how our system works, combined with the way the pomp and circumstance of the presidency has increased, going all the way back to John F. Kennedy. But it's one thing to have forgotten public school civics lessons (yes, there used to be such things), but it's quite another to fancy yourself to be a student of American history and our Constitutional system and believe that the president is a dictator.

Glenn Greenwald writes about a conference call between former Maine Sen. George Mitchell and Michael Goldfarb of The Weekly Standard, in which the latter states that the Founding Fathers

...sought an energetic executive with near dictatorial power in pursuing foreign policy and war. So no, the Constitution does not put Congress on an equal footing with the executive in matters of national security.

The notion that our Constitution vests anything like "near dictatorial power" in the President in any area -- let alone areas as broadly defined as "foreign policy and war" and "national security" -- is so utterly absurd that no response ought to be required. In his post, Goldfarb places a link over the phrase "near dictatorial power" which takes one to Federalist 70, which contains Alexander Hamilton's argument as to why powers assigned by the Constitution to the Executive ought to be vested in one individual rather than an executive council.

Who knows what support Goldfarb thinks there is anywhere in the Federalist Papers for a belief in "near dictatorial power," but if I had to guess, Goldfarb is likely referring to this sentence in Federalist 70:

Every man the least conversant in Roman story, knows how often that republic was obliged to take refuge in the absolute power of a single man, under the formidable title of Dictator, as well against the intrigues of ambitious individuals who aspired to the tyranny, and the seditions of whole classes of the community whose conduct threatened the existence of all government, as against the invasions of external enemies who menaced the conquest and destruction of Rome.


Goldfarb seems to think that when Hamilton described a Roman "Dictator" with "absolute power," he was describing what he hoped the new American President would be. Does that argument need any refutation?

[snip]

America was founded to avoid the warped and tyrannical vision which The Weekly Standard and its comrades crave (and which they have spent the last six years pursuing and implementing). This group actually thinks that, right this very minute, we are at war with Iran and Syria -- and that the President can and should act accordingly against our "Enemies." And they think that even though Congress has not declared war on those countries, something they consider to be only an irrelevant technicality, even though it is that "technicality" which Hamilton, in Federalist 69, identified as one of the key features distinguishing the American President from the British King:


The one [the American President] would have a a right to command the military and naval forces of the nation; the other [the British King], in addition to this right, possesses that of declaring war, and of raising and regulating fleets and armies by his own authority.



This is what's so dangerous about the common and endless repeated reference to the president as "the Commander-in-Chief." This should NOT be a reference to the president as "commander of the country", it simply refers to the president's role as commander-in-chief of the armed forces. When the media and others who are fixated on the notion of the president as some sort of demigod (but only if he's a Republican), and use the "commander-in-chief" moniker, it distorts and perverts the notion of the presidency as an elective office, one of service to the country. The president is the person the electors chosen by the American people elect to serve the people; to act as temporary steward of the Constitution. It is not an elected kingship, and to refer to the temporary occupant of the office using the word "commander-in-chief" opens the doors for people like Michael Goldfarb and William Kristol to tout their dreams of a strong, all-powerful Daddy figure in stentorian tones that show the kind of Very Serious Scholars they are. The only problem is that they haven't a clue what they're talking about.

I don't know anything about Goldfarb's lineage, but William Kristol is the son of Irving Kristol, the Trotskyite turned founding father of the neocon movement. And you thought YOUR family had issues.

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