DAS Blog

The question being "is Feingold playing politics with his censure resolution?".

We seem to forget (so shortly after the Clinton admin when such conflict was taken to be entirely appropriate and as a matter of course ... in spite of the fact that Clinton was actually fighting a war on terrorists like bin Laden as opposed to pretending to do so while giving the terrorists everything they ever wanted -- e.g. deposing Saddam Hussein -- of course Clinton was a scalawag whereas Bush is a "good person" so deserves some slack, right [ gag ]) that, according to the Framers, one of the roles of Congress is to provide a check and balance to the executive branch so that the President should not be an uncheck Monarch.

So why isn't Antonin "Original Intent" Scalia also doing his role of being a check and standing with Feingold?

Madison was very clear: "ambition must be made to check ambition". So what if Feingold is only doing this to please us in the Democratic base in anticipation of a presidential run. That's the way things are supposed to work. For Congress to show such deference to the President is frankly un-American, even in a time of war (otherwise what is to stop a President from waging war just to get war powers?) -- even in the Greatest War Ever (TM), aka WWII (the kinds of people who rant and rave about how good WWII was are the same sorts of people who didn't want to enter WWII when it was a matter of the allies fighting Germany and only wanted to join in when those "yellow people attacked us", hence my snarkiness), we had Truman rising to fame criticizing the war effort. Today we would call Harry Truman un-American.

Am I the only one who sees something wrong here? Why should Feingold's motives be questioned? In this case, they don't matter. If the system was working correctly, all of Congress would be out to score political points criticizing the President's illegal actions. That they are not indicates that there is something deeply wrong with our democratic republic: in large part because of the way the media frames issues, but in large part because too many people forget what it means to be a citizen in a democratic republic. It does not mean that we should worship our leader.