http://www.thenewamerican.com/files/TNA2507.pdf
TG: Here is another great example of Bush holding the door open for Obama - with the help of conservative Christians wed to the Republican party. I told everybody over and over that we shouldn't give Bush extra authorities because, even if he doesn't abuse them (a foolish assumption), eventually they would be passed on to someone like Obama or Hillary. Now Obama can hang us with the rope WE provided (well, the rope YOU provided in spite of my warnings).
President Obama also plans to “rescind a Bush Administration rule that granted protection to doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and other health care workers who refuse to perform or assist in abortions, sterilizations, and other contraceptive procedures on moral grounds ” if their organizations receive federal funds. The pro-life groups who supported the Bush administration’s unconstitutional forays into areas reserved to the states, such as sumptuary laws, are now witnessing the inherent dangers of an Imperial Presidency when the pendulum swings the other way. Obama has also vowed to continue Bush’s faith-based initiatives but to add stringent secular mandates to the funding. None of the above-stated goals included any mention of oversight by Congress or constitutional authorization. It will simply come about because Obama says so.
George W. Bush enthusiastically adopted the concept of using signing statements as a pseudo line-item veto.
Senator Obama criticized numerous Bush administration methods but has now adopted all of them. One of these methods was the use of the “state secrets” legal defense to prevent trials against those who may have participated in torture. Now Obama has asserted that very same defense. “In other words, individual constitutional rights of the highest order should be sacrificed on the altar of national security.” Obama also used the state-secrets defense to stop challenges to the Bush “Terrorist Surveillance Program ” (TSP) that he had attacked as a senator. Perhaps having the ability to now control the massive wire-tapping program has lessened the president’s disdain for its violations of privacy.
Fein summarizes how Obama has incorporated the Bush abuses into his administration: “President Obama has left undisturbed the bulwark of other Bush-Cheney usurpations or constitutional excesses: the Military Commissions Act of 2006; the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendments Act of 2008, which eviscerates the Fourth Amendment; the Status of Forces Agreement with Iraq concluded and President Bush's hundreds of signing statements.
This means that Obama can wiretap and listen to Americans at random and detain people indefinitely as “enemy combatants,” denying them the right of habeas corpus (to challenge their detention in court). Are these really powers we want one individual holding?Should Americans feel safe keeping these powers imbued in our Imperial Presidency just because Obama seems like a nice person?
His recent decision to increase the conflict in the Afghanistan war by sending 17,000 more troops into the battlefield barely raised a peep from Congress. His announcement to keep up to 50,000 troops in Iraq past 2011, which even was endorsed by war hawk John McCain, has already been accepted s a reality.
TG: So what difference did it make whether we elected Obama or McCain? Either of them would've essentially been a third Bush term. We'd have been far better off to support a genuine constitutionalist like Ron Paul and help the liberty movement grow.
