W Flips off Congress Again

[Preechr]

So one's right to free speech is suspended if it's expressed in a way that pisses John Kerry off? This is another purely political appointment that is being criticized for it's political nature, yet the only reason for Kerry's blocking of his appointment is petty political score-settling. According to the logic of your template, Kerry should resign as your Senator.

[KevinTheOmnivore]

It's a political appointment, yes, but it was done so under the radar to deliberately snub Congress.

I agree with Max. I hated the Bolton appointment (although I've soured on the UN, so maybe I was wrong), and I think this stinks. It's not that the President can't do it, but it just plays out like a bribe pay off and an fu to The Hill.

p.s.-- it clearly didn't just piss off John Kerry, but what bugs me is that Lieberman enabled this appointment, cuz Fox is a buddy.

[Preechr]

Reagan had almost 300 recess appointments to his name, and every other president back to JFK had over a hundred...

[mburbank]

And almost every one of them is an abuse of authority. A smaller portion are deliberate insults.

Fox's right to free speech AND Kerry's right to be pissed off are not in question. Nor is the 'right' of the President to appoint a guy who he had to withdraw as a nominee because he was never going to get the job on votes, of which Kerry has, at last count, one.

W (and all preidents) have the legal authority to do all sorts of things. Which of those things they choose to do, how often they do them, how baldly and how ridiculously they lie before during and after define them.

I've yet to live through a president I liked. Some of them I like a whole lot less than others. And then there's W. I believe my extreme dislike of W and his Posse is reasonable, arrived at after thought and an opinion shared by many distinuished scholars as well as bloviats like myself. Presidencies, like Autism, are a spectrum disorder. On one end You got your Presidents that have a little trouble making eye contact and like baseball statistics too much, and and on the other you got your yowling, biting, drooling, plate spinning, moaning, beeping presidents. Guess where I think W. is on that spetrum?

[Preechr]

I'm guessing the side that is the devil?

[Preechr]

Is there any room in there, btw, for checks and balances the president might have on the power of Congress, or do you figure it only goes one way?

[mburbank]

The side of the really autistic devil.

And his side of the balance is making the appointment. He can make appointment after apointment he knows won't go through and take the gamble that the constant rejection of his appointments makes the congress look worse than it makes him look.

OR he can appoint people he honestly thinks might be qualified and challenge congress to defy him.

He can also make recess apointments. He can do it to fill a position that desperately needs filling and as executive he feels filling the position is more important than confressional oversite. That's a hard case to make when you're appointing the ambassador to Belgium.

Or, legally, he can abuse his authority and make a recess appointement as a way of saying 'fuck you'. He is totally allowed to do that under current law. But when the opposition party or congress points out this this is the action of an asshole who cares more about saying fuck you than acknowledging the oversight role of congress, the President has no choice but to eat it, or make a convincing case. W has a big problem of wanting to say fuck you and have everybody treat it like he kissed a baby. Legally he can, and does, go right to the wall (and argubaly over and under it as well) with his authority to say "I'm the decider, that's why." But I would say his loss of congress and his lousy approval numbers that people are tired of it. It doesn't look as if he cares. Sounds like the Pres has a lot of power in the checks and balances game.

Oh, and Vetos. He has those. Not on appointment rejections, but on all the stuff congress decides. He checks their decisions, congress checks his. I swear to the sweet baby Jesus, the only part of my public school educumation that was any good was the basic civics portion of social studies, and they seem to have replaced it with Kwanza Appreciattion and Health ed classes taugfht by gym teachers.