Power and process
by digby
Rand Paul doesn’t want the president to have too much power.
I care that too much power gets in one place. Why? Because there are instances in our history where we allow power to gravitate toward one person and that one person then makes decisions that really are egregious,” Paul said. “Think of what happened in World War II where they made the decision. The president issued an executive order. He said to Japanese people ‘we’re going to put you in a camp. We’re going to take away all your rights and liberties and we’re going to intern you in a camp.'”
He was, of course, comparing that to President Obama’s immigration order. The fact that he chose that case as an example can’t be a coincidence. It involves a minority group and a controversial executive order about their status, after all. Of course, it couldn’t be more different. Roosevelt’s order to intern Japanese Americans was a terrible, discriminatory decision which nobody (but Michelle Malkin) can defend. Who do you suppose are the minority being oppressed by Obama’s tyrannical power grab are? Tea partiers? Why not?
I’m sure he didn’t bring that issue up out of the blue but he was actually making a different point about the process and power. A lot of people on both sides of the aisle opportunistically approve of presidential power depending on who the president is and what he’s trying to do. Shocker. But there are people who believe on principle that the president should defer to congress because they are closer to the people who elected them. Paul, however, doesn’t believe that government should do much of anything so he’s also being opportunistic. He prefers congress to be the decider mostly because they are very slow to do anything and right now are completely gridlocked. Win-win for him.
I confess that I used to care about these principles more than I do now. I thought it was terribly important that the congress take the lead because it is a deliberative body answerable to the people, the constitution blah,blah, blah. But the truth is that congress is bullshit. It’s a fine idea but in practice they pretty much always rubber stamp the worst things a president wants to do in foreign policy and the only domestic initiatives they ever wholeheartedly support are tax cuts, jails and money for cops. They don’t even do pork barrel spending anymore which used to at least benefit a few people in their individual states. Everything else is just working around the edges. Not that those things don’t matter.Every decent policy can make a difference. It’s just that I no longer fetishize the legislative process because it’s mostly just kabuki anyway. At this point, I’ll take decent outcomes wherever I can get them and be thankful for it since they happen so rarely.
Again, for Paul gridlock is a feature not a bug. And frankly, for all his caterwauling about presidential misdeeds on the foreign policy and national security front, most of the time he’s just arguing for process for process sake — for instance, he wants a vote on the ISIS operation but fully admits that it will pass and that he will vote for it. So, that will be a nice pageant for us all to watch, but it won’t make a bit of difference.
It doesn’t have to be this way, of course. We could elect a congress that takes its prerogatives seriously, challenges the massive national security apparatus and agrees to work on behalf of the people instead of their big money benefactors. That would help. Let’s do that, shall we?
In the meantime Rand Paul can keep his lugubrious paeans to the primacy of the legislative process over executive power. He simply wants the government to do nothing at all and there’s no faster or clearer route to that end than throwing an initiative into the black hole known as the US Congress.
.