Comment by Brandil Lawrence #263

Boo! Bambi,

INBRED!

Section 1. The executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America. He shall hold his office during the term of four years, and, together with the Vice President, chosen for the same term, be elected, as follows:

Each state shall appoint, in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors, equal to the whole number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or person holding an office of trust or profit under the United States, shall be appointed an elector.

The electors shall meet in their respective states, and vote by ballot for two persons, of whom one at least shall not be an inhabitant of the same state with themselves. And they shall make a list of all the persons voted for, and of the number of votes for each; which list they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the seat of the government of the United States, directed to the President of the Senate. The President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates, and the votes shall then be counted. The person having the greatest number of votes shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of electors appointed; and if there be more than one who have such majority, and have an equal number of votes, then the House of Representatives shall immediately choose by ballot one of them for President; and if no person have a majority, then from the five highest on the list the said House shall in like manner choose the President. But in choosing the President, the votes shall be taken by States, the representation from each state having one vote; A quorum for this purpose shall consist of a member or members from two thirds of the states, and a majority of all the states shall be necessary to a choice. In every case, after the choice of the President, the person having the greatest number of votes of the electors shall be the Vice President. But if there should remain two or more who have equal votes, the Senate shall choose from them by ballot the Vice President.

The Congress may determine the time of choosing the electors, and the day on which they shall give their votes; which day shall be the same throughout the United States.

No person except a natural born citizen, or a citizen of the United States, at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to that office who shall not have attained to the age of thirty five years, and been fourteen Years a resident within the United States.

In case of the removal of the President from office, or of his death, resignation, or inability to discharge the powers and duties of the said office, the same shall devolve on the Vice President, and the Congress may by law provide for the case of removal, death, resignation or inability, both of the President and Vice President, declaring what officer shall then act as President, and such officer shall act accordingly, until the disability be removed, or a President shall be elected.

The President shall, at stated times, receive for his services, a compensation, which shall neither be increased nor diminished during the period for which he shall have been elected, and he shall not receive within that period any other emolument from the United States, or any of them.

Before he enter on the execution of his office, he shall take the following oath or affirmation:–”I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

Section 2. The President shall be commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several states, when called into the actual service of the United States; he may require the opinion, in writing, of the principal officer in each of the executive departments, upon any subject relating to the duties of their respective offices, and he shall have power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment.

He shall have power, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, to make treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, shall appoint ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls, judges of the Supreme Court, and all other officers of the United States, whose appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by law: but the Congress may by law vest the appointment of such inferior officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the courts of law, or in the heads of departments.

The President shall have power to fill up all vacancies that may happen during the recess of the Senate, by granting commissions which shall expire at the end of their next session.

Section 3. He shall from time to time give to the Congress information of the state of the union, and recommend to their consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient; he may, on extraordinary occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them, and in case of disagreement between them, with respect to the time of adjournment, he may adjourn them to such time as he shall think proper; he shall receive ambassadors and other public ministers; he shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed, and shall commission all the officers of the United States.

Section 4. The President, Vice President and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”

Now, BSR and all you other idiots on the right, I see nothing here, even the case of war, which says the President of the USA has the right to spy on Americans without a warrant.

You clowns are really Nazi Pigs, goosetepping to your own drum.

You probably consider our countries founding documents like the Constituion and the Declaration of Independence as Liberal Propaganda.

I should have quoted Mein Kampf.

Comment by Brandil Lawrence — January 24, 2006 @ 11:00 pm

Uh, I think you’re the idiot nimrod.

Thats from the PreAmble of OUR Declaration of Independence

Dimwit.

You might as well forget about this administration protecting you and just count on them taking your civil liberties, since you are so freely giving them up for this GREAT SECURITY AND PROTECTION this administration has given us.

Yeah, you can count on them. Then when the attacks are occuring, your elustrious leader just sat in the chair after being told that we were under attack.

Your doing a heck of a job Bush.

That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is in the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness

Good question, Arne. Can a Congress impeach a King?

Comment by Solitaire — January 24, 2006 @ 9:00 pm

Maybe not, but we can issue a Declaration of Independence. :)

You guys are really out of the mainstream if you think that Republicans are going to remove Bush from office. Maybe that sort of thing happens in your little fantasy world, but how on earth do you think you are going to get 67 senators to vote to remove?

I dunno. When you can easily stir up 50 senators to vote to impeach someone for a consensual blow-job, common sense says that the bar for removing someone running rough-shod over the Constitution should easily be passed. Of course, that assumes common sense (and a smidgen of honour and a disdain for hypocrisy). So, pray tell, why do you think that those folks that voted to convict Clinton might be loath to do the same to someone blatantly violating the will of COngress and the law of the land?

Cheers,

Uhhhh, right. I think you misspelled “remedy to”. But when it comes to having a “purpose” of impeaching the president, you Republicans have a lot to answer for (and a pile of stinking hypocrisy three miles high on the subject). Unlike you, our memories are still functional.

Cheers,

The Administration’s new FISA defense is factually false

As Atrios notes:

That’s it.

COMMENT: What if Congress passes an unconstituional law? What if FISA, as applied to the NSA program, encroaches on powers already given to the President under Article II?

If he disagrees with the law, he can choose to disobey it … just like any other person can, you, me, or the milkman. He may think, just as we may in our own particular instances, that the law is unconstitutional. He may even argue that point, and if he wins in court, he gets off … just as you or I would. But if he’s found to be wrong by the courts, he’s still a law-breaker, just as you or I would be. And I hate to point this out, but most people that argue laws unconstitutional are not very successful; it’s a hard burden to prove as the legislature usually does a pretty good job of avoiding controversial or outright wrong acts.

I’d note that the more common course (not only for presidents, but even for some lay parties) is to put the issue before the courts and let them decide before risking imprisonment by violating the laws they challenge (but I’d note that in some cases a person seeking to challenge a law needs to violate it beforehand to even make the courts interested in making a decision; courts usually shy away from considering cases without a factual predicate basis and without parties with an actual stake in the legal questions). When Clinton was faced with a similar problem in the Ames case, he put it before the nation to get a ruling on it, and went and got laws passed that clarified the issue. Not so Dubya, in fact he did the opposite.

COMMENT: You keep referring to FISA as “the law.” Congressional enactments are not the only source of “the law.”

That’s because they are. As provided by the Constitution, the legislative power is a exclusive (i.e., non-delegable) power of Congress. And when Congress states one thing uncontradicted, that is the law. Only the Constitution trumps that. And you have provided neither any example of the Constitution nor any other law contradicting the FISA law. So that’s “the law we have, not the law we want.”

COMMENT: You cannot cite one legal authority or historical example of your assertions about use of force authorizations or the application of FISA to wartime intelligence.

One “legal authority” (and in law school, it would be considered “mandatory authority”) is the text of the law itself (at one time before the “conservatives” sold their soul to the Devil, in fact they insisted that the language and the language only was determinative, a philosophy easily cast aside when incon

In fact, FISA very well may not apply at all to wartime intelligence, ….

And on Krypton, pigs can fly. Why don’t you read the freakin’ FISA law? Then you’d see that it actually specifies specifically what can be done in time of war. If you’re ignorant, best not to show it, BSR….

Cheers,

The other blatant similarity on 24 is that the president in 24 is completely clueless as to what is going on in his own administration.