There’s a first time for everything…

I’ll admit it. Republicans have gotten one thing right. Sort of. Not right enough to be able to say “I told you so” or anything. Right from the completely wrong direction. Right in the wrong way. And yet, they’re still a little bit right.

The best defense for Bush during and after 2000 (other than that he’s the candidate you would prefer to invite to a barbecue) was that he was a business man (or bidness man, if you will). Republicans love the idea of the CEO president.

Well, they interpret it to mean that we should elect a CEO to be president, which is completely wrong. I might suggest that we elect a president to be a CEO. Bear with me a second.

The Constitution in Articles I and II (Legislative and Executive Branches) lay out the way Congress and the President are to behave. Article I articulates that the bicameral legislature is there to govern the nation. They are the representatives of the people and do the work of the people. They declare war, they impeach the president, they write and pass legislation. That is their primary duty. In the second Article, we are given three main jobs of the president: appoint administrators of the government, nominate justices to the Supreme Court, and serve as Commander-in-Chief for the armed forces. That's about it.

Here’s the problem. Commander-in-Chief is the least defined title in the Constitution. It means nothing and everything, depending on how you look at it. But recognizing the role of Congress to decide the whether or not we go to war, it is clear that the title of Commander is the most important one (and not Chief). The fact of the matter is that the president is only intended to be the strategist and to be an officer in the military. The Congress determines the overall fate of military endeavors, not the president.

By this time you might be clamoring to give me historical examples or arguing that the roles have never taken off this way, but this is clearly the intention of the law.

So here it is: the president is management. S/He is to oversee the operations of the government. S/He hires and fires the cabinet heads and makes sure that the different departments get and have what they need. S/He gives speeches about the government and says all the great things it is doing and why you should invest in it. S/He oversees the military in much the same way.

Congress, on the other hand, should be seen as civil engineers (not a board of directors—too confrontational). Their job is to make sure that the country is going in the right direction, that future accommodations are being planned for, and that we are operating with highest social, economic, and spiritual efficiency.

And there’s the rub. When the president steals this authority from congress (unitary presidency—see Dick Cheney’s Law) or operates in the same sphere of influence with Congress, writing laws, pushing heavily on the veto, it creates inefficiency. Outright conflict is not an inevitable option, but a choice. The fact of the matter is that we, like the Hebrew people, have the tools at our disposal to live out the Kingdom of God within our society, but our preference is for kings. We want strong and emotional and immature leaders that give us justifiable reasons to hate other people and to live out injustice in our environment. We seem to want the supreme overlord. But unlike the Hebrews, who wanted a king to be like their neighbors, we want a strong-armed fascist tyrant, not like our neighbors (Canada and Mexico) or our compatriots in Europe (Britain, France, Scandinavian countries), but like Saudi Arabia, North Korea, and Russia. It is preferring a criminal justice system like North Korea’s to that of England.

One of the greatest misnomers is the State of the Union address in which the president processes into Congress like a king and is bid by the Speaker of the House to present a ‘state of the union’ to Congress. But looking at both the way the Constitution is written and the very dynamics of the situation, we have it backward. Putting the president, whose spends his time in Washington or oversees is telling Congress, the legislative body that spends 1/3-1/2 their time with their constituents, how the country is doing? Isn’t the president a little insulated for that? Aren’t the members of Congress much more qualified to tell the president the real state of the union?

This is the primary issue. The president is not a king. The president has none of the powers of Congress and is not intended to play their game on their field. The president should spend his/her time making sure that the Secretary of Education is making our youth the best educated in the world. S/He should spend time making sure that the head of the Environmental Protection Agency is not only determining our environmental impact, but addressing those concerns in calls for Congressional action. The president should spend his/her time better engaging our military forces in actions mandated by Congress. But…

We have the believer in the unitary presidency, whose behavior in directing Congress, demanding fealty from the troops, and ignoring those appointed to run the government (most of whom are glaringly unqualified for their jobs if not indefensibly and intentionally bent on sabotaging their agency). Pres. Bush is operating as a true fascist king, not only coronated to an imaginary thrown, but surrounded by an elite guard of politicians, lawyers, and media personalities and moguls that want you to believe that Bush is not only Commander-in-Chief of the military, but of the country. And that is just disgusting.