President Bush should heed James Madison’s warning
Allentown Morning Call, PA The press was barred from the 1787 Constitutional Convention so that the contentious delegates could speak freely. However, James Madison’s notes on the debates are a valuable source for our founding origins as a nation. And, in the Federalist Papers, Madison — urging the new Americans to vote to ratify the proposed Constitution — wrote on an issue now being fiercely debated again: the extent of a president’s powers. In this case, what George W. Bush claims are his ”inherent” constitutional powers in the war on terrorism. The time has come for Madison to enter the present debate.
In the Federalist No. 47, Madison said plainly: ”The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”
Madison went on — and this is what troubles me about the presence of John Roberts and Samuel Alito on the Supreme Court — to say:
”Were the federal Constitution, therefore, really chargeable with the accumulation of power, or with a mixture of powers, having a dangerous tendency to such an accumulation, no further arguments would be necessary to inspire a universal reprobation of (our) system … The preservation of liberty requires that the three great departments of power should be separate and distinct.” Roberts and Alito have shown excessive deference to executive government powers.
On Dec. 16, on C-SPAN’s ”Washington Journal,” Bruce Fein, former associate deputy attorney general in President Reagan’s administration, and a continually challenging conservative constitutional scholar, explained why this continuing debate on the sweeping powers of ”the unitary executive” is the most crucial of all controversies during the Bush presidency so far: [more]