Bush pushes through 700 billion economic plan

I think it is great news. I take my hat off to George Bush in the last ten days. Well done president Bush. I think we are often in danger of "villainizing" people different from us. As a guy that grew up in a very Democratic household I struggle to balance the attacks with some mercy. We all need a little mercy. Rush Limbaugh especially needs mercy. But that is not my point today. What I notice about myself, as a person that follows a Rabbi--Jesus--is that I am often very humbled by the person that has been shunned by our culture. Take for instance the story of Zacchaeus. Jesus asks Zacchaeus if he can come to his house for dinner. What? Zacheus almost fell out of the tree when Jesus said that. Zacchaeus' reputation was so bad around town. Like Zacchaeus, President Bush is also hated around town. He has stolen from us, we say, he has rapped Iraq, we say, and he has done it all while on vacation. This is what the liberals would say. But I think this is an unfortunate take on a man. While the war in Iraq was "wrong" and "backwards" and "illegitimate," it still goes on. I find Bush, as he ends his term, to be more and more endearing. When he leaves the white house, to be replaced by a black man ( praise the Lord), I think I may even cry. I like "human" he is. I like that he reminds me of Zaccheaus. And therefore, he reminds me of God. Well, I am not saying that he is God. I am saying that he reminds me of the gospel when I see him and all of his mistakes. I know this sounds crazy, but I think it is true. Jesus loves us without merit, without being correct, and especially in the midst of our bad decisions.

Bush has been so beaten down by the media, by even his own party, I am not sure how he sleeps at night. And the poor guy looks like he has gained forty years in the last 8. Now, let me be honest. I never voted for him, nor would I. But, the latest bailout is perfect evidence of his struggle. While he has the support of most democrats, his only dissenters are from his own party. Is that not ironic?

I can understand why that are mad. Republicans are for "big business," and a "market driven economy." I do not believe in a strictly based market driven economy. Our nation is way too big for that. What about roads, what about schools, and what about our running water? Do we really want everything to be run by a strictly capitalistic system? I hope the answer is no! But that is a hope, and I think this latest bailout effort is a great example of the importance of oversight, management, and a systemic body that governs the affairs of a nation.

While it seems odd that a Republican would push a $700 billion dollar through, I think he has done it. I congratulate Bush on this effort. It is very "UN-Republican" of him, but that is great. It may be the only possible way to salvage his reputation as one of the worst presidents in the history of our nation. The following article is very interesting and worth heeding as we think about the legacy left behind by George W. Bush. So what is the point of all this? Well, it is two fold. We must be honest about our mistakes. Bush has made many. The article points that out. And as a conservative I need to truly heed them. But, even more importantly, and especially since I have been saved by the mercy of Jesus Christ--I must have mercy, and I must pray for God to have mercy on me.
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History may ultimately hold Bush in the greatest contempt for expanding the powers of the presidency beyond the limits laid down by the U.S. Constitution. There has always been a tension over the constitutional roles of the three branches of the federal government. The Framers intended as much, as part of the system of checks and balances they expected would minimize tyranny. When Andrew Jackson took drastic measures against the nation's banking system, the Whig Senate censured him for conduct "dangerous to the liberties of the people." During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln's emergency decisions to suspend habeas corpus while Congress was out of session in 1861 and 1862 has led some Americans, to this day, to regard him as a despot. Richard Nixon's conduct of the war in Southeast Asia and his covert domestic-surveillance programs prompted Congress to pass new statutes regulating executive power.

By contrast, the Bush administration -- in seeking to restore what Cheney, a Nixon administration veteran, has called "the legitimate authority of the presidency" -- threatens to overturn the Framers' healthy tension in favor of presidential absolutism. Armed with legal findings by his attorney general (and personal lawyer) Alberto Gonzales, the Bush White House has declared that the president's powers as commander in chief in wartime are limitless. No previous wartime president has come close to making so grandiose a claim. More specifically, this administration has asserted that the president is perfectly free to violate federal laws on such matters as domestic surveillance and the torture of detainees. When Congress has passed legislation to limit those assertions, Bush has resorted to issuing constitutionally dubious "signing statements," which declare, by fiat, how he will interpret and execute the law in question, even when that interpretation flagrantly violates the will of Congress. Earlier presidents, including Jackson, raised hackles by offering their own view of the Constitution in order to justify vetoing congressional acts. Bush doesn't bother with that: He signs the legislation (eliminating any risk that Congress will overturn a veto), and then governs how he pleases -- using the signing statements as if they were line-item vetoes. In those instances when Bush's violations of federal law have come to light, as over domestic surveillance, the White House has devised a novel solution: Stonewall any investigation into the violations and bid a compliant Congress simply to rewrite the laws.

Bush's alarmingly aberrant take on the Constitution is ironic. One need go back in the record less than a decade to find prominent Republicans railing against far more minor presidential legal infractions as precursors to all-out totalitarianism. "I will have no part in the creation of a constitutional double-standard to benefit the president," Sen. Bill Frist declared of Bill Clinton's efforts to conceal an illicit sexual liaison. "No man is above the law, and no man is below the law -- that's the principle that we all hold very dear in this country," Rep. Tom DeLay asserted. "The rule of law protects you and it protects me from the midnight fire on our roof or the 3 a.m. knock on our door," warned Rep. Henry Hyde, one of Clinton's chief accusers. In the face of Bush's more definitive dismissal of federal law, the silence from these quarters is deafening.

The president's defenders stoutly contend that war-time conditions fully justify Bush's actions. And as Lincoln showed during the Civil War, there may be times of military emergency where the executive believes it imperative to take immediate, highly irregular, even unconstitutional steps. "I felt that measures, otherwise unconstitutional, might become lawful," Lincoln wrote in 1864, "by becoming indispensable to the preservation of the Constitution, through the preservation of the nation." Bush seems to think that, since 9/11, he has been placed, by the grace of God, in the same kind of situation Lincoln faced. But Lincoln, under pressure of daily combat on American soil against fellow Americans, did not operate in secret, as Bush has. He did not claim, as Bush has, that his emergency actions were wholly regular and constitutional as well as necessary; Lincoln sought and received Congressional authorization for his suspension of habeas corpus in 1863. Nor did Lincoln act under the amorphous cover of a "war on terror" -- a war against a tactic, not a specific nation or political entity, which could last as long as any president deems the tactic a threat to national security. Lincoln's exceptional measures were intended to survive only as long as the Confederacy was in rebellion. Bush's could be extended indefinitely, as the president sees fit, permanently endangering rights and liberties guaranteed by the Constitution to the citizenry.

* * * *

Much as Bush still enjoys support from those who believe he can do no wrong, he now suffers opposition from liberals who believe he can do no right. Many of these liberals are in the awkward position of having supported Bush in the past, while offering little coherent as an alternative to Bush's policies now. Yet it is difficult to see how this will benefit Bush's reputation in history.

The president came to office calling himself "a uniter, not a divider" and promising to soften the acrimonious tone in Washington. He has had two enormous opportunities to fulfill those pledges: first, in the noisy aftermath of his controversial election in 2000, and, even more, after the attacks of September 11th, when the nation pulled behind him as it has supported no other president in living memory. Yet under both sets of historically unprecedented circumstances, Bush has chosen to act in ways that have left the country less united and more divided, less conciliatory and more acrimonious -- much like James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson and Herbert Hoover before him. And, like those three predecessors, Bush has done so in the service of a rigid ideology that permits no deviation and refuses to adjust to changing realities. Buchanan failed the test of Southern secession, Johnson failed in the face of Reconstruction, and Hoover failed in the face of the Great Depression. Bush has failed to confront his own failures in both domestic and international affairs, above all in his ill-conceived responses to radical Islamic terrorism. Having confused steely resolve with what Ralph Waldo Emerson called "a foolish consistency . . . adored by little statesmen," Bush has become entangled in tragedies of his own making, compounding those visited upon the country by outside forces.

No historian can responsibly predict the future with absolute certainty. There are too many imponderables still to come in the two and a half years left in Bush's presidency to know exactly how it will look in 2009, let alone in 2059. There have been presidents -- Harry Truman was one -- who have left office in seeming disgrace, only to rebound in the estimates of later scholars. But so far the facts are not shaping up propitiously for George W. Bush. He still does his best to deny it. Having waved away the lessons of history in the making of his decisions, the present-minded Bush doesn't seem to be concerned about his place in history. "History. We won't know," he told the journalist Bob Woodward in 2003. "We'll all be dead."

Another president once explained that the judgments of history cannot be defied or dismissed, even by a president. "Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history," said Abraham Lincoln. "We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation."

SEAN WILENTZ
Posted Apr 21, 2006 12:34 PM