Hi,
Since Shrub has admitted to being aliterate, we can all rest assured that he did not read the bill. Just like we can be fairly certain that the sponsors of the bill and of the changes to the bill probably read very little besides their own contributions (if those). However, the staff principle applies. The elected leaders (more correctly, figureheads) of the assigned and appointed underlings are responsible for what their underlings do. Thus, Shrub *is* responsible for his actions on the basis of the recommendations of his staff. He is, in effect, their representative to his boss, the American public. Unless, of course, you feel (as I sometimes do) that representative government has become as much a fiction as state's rights has been since the second half of the nineteenth century.
To be fair, Shrub is simply following long established presidential custom of signing a bill without questioning extraneous riders to that bill. That custom subverts representative government in that it gives special interest legislation, especially pork, a way of slipping through the process without ever being directly voted on. Had every president from Washington down simply returned to Congress any and all bills with extraneous riders, that extra-legal process would probably be extinct instead of being the *primary* process by which crap gets done.
So, yeah, it is Shrub's fault. And Clinton's. And Bush's. And Regan's. . . . And, most probably, Washington's.
And ours, if indeed 'we the people' are sovereign, for failing to exercise *our* sovereignty and kicking unscrupulous bastards that fail to do our bidding. "We have met the enemy, and they is us." -- Kelly.
--Pete
kandrathe,Jan 13 2006, 09:53 AM Wrote:Imagine the political fallout if this bill was vetoed. The president gets a Yes/No decision, so the work to make this bill right should have been done in Congress.And therein lies the problem, a lack of line item veto power. But then again, a line item veto gives the executive branch *too* much power. If there were a good solution to this problem, then the founding fathers apparently did not know of it, and two centuries later, neither do I.
[right][snapback]99324[/snapback][/right]
Since Shrub has admitted to being aliterate, we can all rest assured that he did not read the bill. Just like we can be fairly certain that the sponsors of the bill and of the changes to the bill probably read very little besides their own contributions (if those). However, the staff principle applies. The elected leaders (more correctly, figureheads) of the assigned and appointed underlings are responsible for what their underlings do. Thus, Shrub *is* responsible for his actions on the basis of the recommendations of his staff. He is, in effect, their representative to his boss, the American public. Unless, of course, you feel (as I sometimes do) that representative government has become as much a fiction as state's rights has been since the second half of the nineteenth century.
To be fair, Shrub is simply following long established presidential custom of signing a bill without questioning extraneous riders to that bill. That custom subverts representative government in that it gives special interest legislation, especially pork, a way of slipping through the process without ever being directly voted on. Had every president from Washington down simply returned to Congress any and all bills with extraneous riders, that extra-legal process would probably be extinct instead of being the *primary* process by which crap gets done.
So, yeah, it is Shrub's fault. And Clinton's. And Bush's. And Regan's. . . . And, most probably, Washington's.
And ours, if indeed 'we the people' are sovereign, for failing to exercise *our* sovereignty and kicking unscrupulous bastards that fail to do our bidding. "We have met the enemy, and they is us." -- Kelly.
--Pete
How big was the aquarium in Noah's ark?