44 To Reverse 43's Executive Orders

Obama Expected To Shift Policy On Torture, Gitmo And Other Controversial Measures

(The Politico)  This story was written by Ben Smith and Lisa Lerer

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President-elect Barack Obama is expected to move swiftly to reverse executive orders regarding torture of terror suspects, the military prison at Guantanamo Bay and other controversial security policies, sources close to his transition said, in dramatic gestures aimed at reversing President Bush’s accumulation of executive power.

Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) said he’s been informed that President Obama will support his proposed legislation to make public some opinions from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, which issued some of the Bush Administration's most sweeping claims of executive power. Obama also has promised to limit President Bush's practice of using "signing statements" to amend legislation.

"Every day we get indications that they're serious about reversing the abuses of the Constitution," Feingold, a harsh Bush critic, told Politico. Feingold said Obama's staff told him to expect executive orders rapidly reversing Bush policies on the interrogation and detention of terror suspects, and on keeping the records of past presidents secret. He declined to be more specific.

"I don't know in what order or how fast" Obama’s executive orders could come, he said. "It'll be important that a couple of them be done immediately, and I think they will be, to show there's a strong break from the current policy."

Chris Lu, executive director of Obama’s transition team, told supporters in a conference call earlier this month that Obama’s aides have “started developing executive orders that the pres elect is considering - not only ones the President-elect will sign after January 20, but also ones we will want to repeal."

Obama aides didn't respond to requests for more detail, but the president-elect campaigned against what he called Bush’s abuse of executive authority.

"I was a constitutional law professor, which means unlike the current president, I actually respect the Constitution," Obama told an audience at a campaign fundraiser in 2007.

In “Change for America,” a book by the Center for American Progress that was designed as a blueprint for Obama’s presidency, Yale Law School dean Harold Hongju Koh outlined "a package of executive orders, proposed legislation, agency shakeups, and concrete foreign policy actions” the new president should embrace, including “four key executive orders” requiring the closing of Guantanamo Bay and ending the torture of detainees.

The Associated Press reported Monday that transition advisers said Obama could sign an executive order in his first week ordering the closure of Guantanamo Bay, although shuttering the prison and transferring the prisoners somewhere else would take time.

On Sunday, Obama promised to close the military prison, but cautioned that it may not happen as quickly as civil rights advocates would like.

"I think it’s going to take some time, and our legal teams are working in consultation with our national security apparatus as we speak to help design exactly what we need to do," Obama said on ABC’s ‘This Week’. "But I don’t want to be ambiguous about this. We are going to close Guantanamo, and we are going to make sure that the procedures we set up are ones that abide by our Constitution."

Responding to a 2007 questionnaire from the Boston Globe, Obama said repeatedly that the president doesn't have the power to disregard Congress in matters of war and national security. But he was vague on the question of executive privilege - his right to keep documents and testimony about White House decisions from Congress.

Obama also defended a president’s right to use signing statements to clarify law, but he criticized Bush’s “clear abuse of this prerogative” to undermine laws he didn’t like.

"He is definitely going to handle signing statements in a very different fashion than Bush," said Norm Ornstein, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. "He'll issue some, no doubt, but he'll do it on a limited basis, and in a much more constrained way - he won't be saying, 'I refuse to execute this portion of the law,' for example."

Obama also may be less inclined to cross Congress as long as both houses are controlled by Democrats.

Although he has said little on the issue since his election, foes of executive power have been encouraged by several of Obama’s hiring choices. John Podesta, who Obama chose to lead the transition, testified before Feingold's hearing on "restoring the rule of law" and made a series of specific recommendations, beginning with an executive order establishing "a presumption against classification in cases of significant doubt" and another revoking some secrecy privileges for vice presidents and for the relatives of former presidents.

Obama’s incoming Attorney General, Eric Holder, also denounced Bush’s policies, telling the American Constitution Society last year that “our needlessly abusive and unlawful practices in the ‘War on Terror' have diminished our standing in the world community and made us less, rather than more, safe.”

Perhaps Obama's most important staff choice on this front was Dawn Johnsen, who will head Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel. Johnsen, a law professor at the University of Indiana, was a fierce critic of Bush administration interrogation policies and the legal opinions underlying them. She recently wrote that "the assistant attorney general for OLC and other top Department of Justice officials must also be prepared to resign in the extraordinary event the President persists in acting unlawfully or demands that OLC legitimize unlawful activity."

"I was pleasantly surprised that Obama seems to have picked a head of the Office of Legal Counsel who is willing to tie his hands," said Gene Healy, a vice president at the libertarian Cato Institute.

At the same time, Johnsen served in the Clinton Administration office of legal counsel, which fiercely protected presidential power, and argued that the executive branch did not need authorization to take military actions in Haiti and Bosnia and to strike a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan.

"It will be very interesting to see which person we are going to see," said a lawyer familiar with Johnsen's work. "Will it be like more like views of OLC of the 1990s, or has she decided that Clinton OLC went too far?"

Indeed, not all of Obama’s appointees are reflexive skeptics of executive authority. A potential White House counterbalance to Johnsen is Cass Sunstein, a longtime Obama advisor from their University of Chicago days who will head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.

Although he's best known as a prolific, and liberal, legal scholar, Sunstein defended Bush's stand on his power to resist Congress - though not of his claims of sweeping national security powers.

And observers agree that Obama will be sorely tempted to expand presidential power, not curtail them, once the secrets he's keeping and the policies he's defending are his own, not his predecessor's.

"Some people expect (Obama) to repudiate some executive powers, and it's certainly possible he could say that," said Eric Posner, a law professor at the University of Chicago School of Law. "I just don't think presidents voluntarily give up power ... The last president who cut back on presidential powers was Taft."

Obama's critique of executive power, and discussions about it in the Bush years, have focused largely on foreign policy, but the new president takes office amid the largest-scale government intervention in the American economy since the middle of the last century. The presidents of that era - Roosevelt and Truman -found themselves restrained by the courts in their attempts to meddle in the economy, and some scholars suggested that Obama may be seeking to expand his powers more at home than abroad.

"On the one hand, he's dialing back some of the national security powers that have been controversial over the last eight years," said Cato's Healy. "On the other hand, he seems very comfortable redesigning the economy by executive fiat."

[rosieodminge]

Professor Joseph Olson of Hemline University School of Law, St. Paul ,
Minnesota , points out some interesting facts concerning the Presidential
election:

Number of States won by: Democrats: 19 Republicans: 29
Square miles of land won by: Democrats: 580,000 Republicans: 2,427,000
Population of counties won by: Democrats: 127 million Republicans: 143 million
Murder rate per 100,000 residents in counties won by: Democrats: 13.2 Republicans: 2.1

Professor Olson adds: "In aggregate, the map of the territory Republican
won by Republicans was mostly the land owned by the taxpaying citizens
of the country.
Democrat territory mostly encompassed those citizens living in
government-owned tenements and living off various forms of government
welfare.

[neocons_suck]

Why do conservatives hate America so much?

Posted by neocons_suck

For the same reason you do, they don''''t

Posted by truthMatter at 11:07 PM : Jan 13, 2009

Like all other conservatives, you are having a great deal of difficulty concealing your bitterness and your hatred for America. Why do conservatives hate America so much?

[neocons_suck]

Posted by Regats at 09:39 PM : Jan 13, 2009

Why do conservatives hate America so much?

[regats-2009]

Dear Mr. President (as of 1/21/090.

Don''t close Guantanamo. Not yet.

Granted, there have been horrible abuses against the prisoners there, but those, hopefully, have stopped. And it''s been a grossly inefficient institution, costing $60,000,000 per year to operate, and with 2200 employed to run the facility housing 248 inmates, that makes it approximately nine service personnel at a cost of over $240,000 per year per prisoner,

Don''t close it - reform it.

Either a prisoner is charged with a crime and gets his day in court, represented by competent and well prepared legal counsel, or he is set free.

Immediately.

Already 500 prisoners who had been held without being charged with any crime have been released, some after as many as six years of confinement and often torture. For those others who have never been charged with any crime and won''t be, some will find going home to be impossible, facing death or torture there. With the help of the UN, it should be possible to find them safe haven. Others will have family and friends waiting for them. There''s no reason the release process should not take more than a few weeks.

For those who have committed verifiable acts of terror, approximately 50 to 80 individuals, try them and if convicted, they serve their sentences in a reformed, downsized, efficiently run, Guantanamo prison. Not the ugly torture chamber of the Bush years. Then shut it down when the last convict has served his sentence.

[actornaught]

Results get you reelected or NOT reelected...
Posted by donbl1 at 07:55 PM : Jan 13, 2009

Not exactly. A campaign that convinces voters to vote for it (on a state-by-state basis) gets you (re)elected.

w was never an effective president, he just benefitted from a campaign effective enough to fool a quasi-majority of voters.

[donbl1]

Results get you reelected or NOT reelected.....

7+ years of safety.

Obama will have total responsibility next week. I hope he is up to it.

[kansas1946]

President-elect Barack Obama is expected to move swiftly to reverse executive orders regarding torture of terror suspects, the military prison at Guantanamo Bay and other controversial security policies, sources close to his transition said, in dramatic gestures aimed at reversing President Bush%u2019s accumulation of executive power.
**********************************

Thank God.

[bushtarded]

That''d be the door hitting Bush in the_ass.

[liberalme]

Great Ohbeemie''''s stuff, these documents are not altered.

Posted by hk4u2


Hahaha guess what?

First: of all you''re FOS
Secondly: those are not "documents" they''re writings of someone who hates.
Thirdly: He''s YOUR new president--get used to it.

[hk4u2]

Sure Ohbeemie. Reverse everything. That''s not change!!! Guess change is really not what you had in mind my big fraud. Wonder what will happen when America takes the punk glasses off and realizes that their "Pres Elect" is not even a natural born citizen. Go to www.obamacrimes.com and see for yourself what the court documents show. And unlike most of the Great Ohbeemie''s stuff, these documents are not altered.

[tincup356]

Now someone needs to keep a real close eye on congress....I don''t trust any of them.....we all know the lobbyists will return again when Obama opens up the second 350 billion.....It just pisses me off is....they wanted to take care of the home foreclosures when they asked for the money....now its almost three months later....240,000 more foreclosures have taken place....and the people that run the show and are SUPPOSED to be representing the people.........Have failed us AGAIN......how many more lies and billions will it take for the people to wake up and see .....BOTH parties are corrupt and robbing us blind and have NO INTENTIONS of helping out the people.....so ....is your party as faithful to you .....As you have been to them? I don''t think so.

[inventagod2]

While he is at it, how about some subpoenas too?

Gotta get to the source when removing Bu$hStench...

[tincup356]

It''''s going to take one h-e-l-l of a cleaner to get that sulfur smell out of the White House. Good Luck Obama, you will need every bit you can get.

Posted by endrepubs at 06:38 PM : Jan 13, 2009...................I tell ya it isn''t sulfur.....its.....BUSHIT.

[johngress]

It is good to hear that Obama is going to start reversing dumbya%u201Ds executive orders and signing statements. With that said, Bush need not worry, because he will always retain his legacy of constitutional malfeasance and abuse of power. That is written in stone.
Now the next area the new administration needs to go after is OSHA, the EPA, the FDA, the Department of the Interior and all the other agencies the Bushco screwed up. Put people in there (Dems or Reps) that will follow the law and the science and not slant everything to coincide with their ideology. It is time for science, logic and rule of law once again.

[tincup356]

Monday night will see Bush granting blanket pardons to himself and most of his close cronies......anyone not on that list will be showing up at the attorney generals office Tuesday to try to get in line for plea bargains to testify about Bushes administration in exchange for no prosecution or reduced sentences.

[andor3]

It is a good start. The damage done by 41 and 40 needs to be reversed too.

[walt1944-2009]

The soon-to-be Ex-Great Emperor Bush II is highly upset that soon-to-be Great Emperor Obama intends on REVERSING many of the "BUSHIE" executive orders which the Great Emperor Bush II and VP Darth Vader Cheney dreamed up during their 8 years in office.

After all, it took the Great Emperor Bush II 8 YEARS to accumulate all his power and legalize breaking laws and shredding parts of the Constitution and Bill of Rights which he didn''t like!

How could the Great Emperor Bush II do his job of bringing Nazi and Stalinist dictatorship to the USSA "legally" if he didn''t write orders that allowed him to do just that???

SIG HEIL, JUST WAIT TILL JEB BECOMES GREAT EMPEROR (GOD FORBID!!!)!!!, BUSH!!!

[largohenry]

The more of W''s "executive" orders that President Obama reverses, the better.

[largohenry]

The more of W''s "executive" orders that Obama reverses, the better!

[omega40]

What if I made a similar claim about you? Would you honestly feel the need to give it any attention?

If one was made to me, I would say..."Pound sand".

Posted by mjm117
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So what your saying then is even if (I say that with a big IF since I really think he is a natural citizen) he isn''''t constitutionally eligable you wouldn''''t care. It would be alright for him to trample our constitution.


Posted by Mccain08nc

Are we back to being concerned about the constitution again? You conservatives really ought to print and distribute programs so the rest of us can keep up with your latest positions.