Is bypassing Congress gridlock and appealing directly to the people the only hope Obama has?

[rick-day.livejournal.com]

 

Some fiery shit right here. Shuts them other suits right up proper.


Questions for the group: Is he right regarding Obama's (and ours, collectively) only hope of turning this around? Is Congressional election system so money corrupt that we, the people, must literally fire them from their jobs? 

Does anyone know anything about his references to previous presidents bypassing Congress LIKE A BOSS and going to the people, even at the risk of alienating his own party (even more than he has)?


And what about this new bank idea of his, loaning business capital @ 2%? Which side claims that idea?

EDITED FOR CLARIFICATION: Folks, checks and balances are not the issue here. Not is the abolition of Congress and establishing  Executive dictatorships. That is silly talk.

The issue is the speaker in the video suggests the POTUS, who is free to speak directly to the people, should rally the people against the Congress incumbency.

Some think he has to have Congressional oversight to do so. Er, no. He is not passing laws here, folks.

What the gentleman in the video is suggesting is that Obama talk directly to the people as our LEADER, to point the blame at the entire congress, including his party (80% of the country agree). He has the bully pulpit.

The purpose of the bully pulpit being to rally the people to purge Congress of incumbents, replace them with 'clean' legislators (read clarifications in my comments to those below who misinterpreted the intent), who will pledge to work in a non-partisan manner to get the country back on track (whatever that is; another post for another time)

Comments

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

No President has ever done this, and President Obama as a constitutional law scholar would know better even than to try.

[kylinrouge.livejournal.com]

Wasn't LBJ known as a 'get shit done' sort of guy?

LBJ was the master and one on one influence

[rick-day.livejournal.com]

Yeah like 'pop a cap in that womanizing Yankee's ass, I got work to do'!

Sorry , reading a 3 book bio on LBJ. He's..not the hero I thought he was..

Johnson got shit done in the Senate because if you didn't fall into line, he'd threaten even his own former bosses with loss of committee chairs, pulling of funds from the DNC for their re-election, and generally getting LITERALLY in the face of those not quite seeing his way. This is the way I want Obama to be.

Johnson made the decision to do the Populist thing, at the risk of losing the entire support of the South for his 2nd election run. I think I'd like to see the same sacrifice that LBJ made, the needs of the people over the pull of the power.

Re: LBJ was the master and one on one influence

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately most modern politicians look less at LBJ's legislative legacy and more at what happened when he forfeited the South.

Re: LBJ was the master and one on one influence

[rick-day.livejournal.com]

amen

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Yes, but LBJ worked within the existing system. He was brilliant at arm-twisting, not a dictator.

[rick-day.livejournal.com]

What about the reverences to TR? What did TR do that was similar to the commentator's suggestion?

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

TR said a lot of things but did entirely different things. With Joe Cannon as speaker he actually faced the most powerful Speaker of the House in the nation's history.

[kylinrouge.livejournal.com]

"While in office, Roosevelt became a "trust buster" by forcing the great railroad combination in the Northwest to break apart. As President, Roosevelt saw himself a representative of all the people, including farmers, laborers, white collar workers, and businessmen. Roosevelt therefore was focused on bringing big business under stronger regulation so that he could effectively serve all the people he represented. He sought to regulate, rather than dissolve, most trusts. Efforts continued over the next several years, to reduce the control of "big business" over the U.S. economy and workers. Earlier Congress passed the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890 to maintain economic liberty, and to eliminate restraints on trade and competition. This act came into play during Roosevelt's trust busting activities. " - http://www.nps.gov/history/logcabin/html/tr3.html

Basically, if Congress is owned by corporations, TR was the biggest anti-corporatist out there. He was against big business and monopolies, doing things that helped white collar workers are the expense of big business.

His administration was instrumental at reversing the trend of the degrading quality of food, and the abuse of workers' rights. If it wasn't for him and the Congress at the time, we could've had a communist uprising down the line.

[montecristo.livejournal.com]

Obama has already claimed the absolute power to kill any human being on the planet, anywhere, any time, for any reason at all or none and that his decision cannot be reviewed. Your opinion of what his constitutional law studies will preclude him from doing is wildly optimistic, to the point of being unrealistic, in my opinion.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Wasn't this power actually claimed by FDR when he approved the Manhattan Project, as well as those Presidents encouraging development during the Cold War of the super-viruses? Obama, like Lincoln, is too much the scholar to do half of what he could do if he were willing to throw principle to the wind. He's no Woodrow Wilson.

[montecristo.livejournal.com]

Take off your fuhrerprinzip glasses and look again. The administration is much more than just Obama and they will do pretty much whatever they feel they can get away with. Obama and the administration has already involved the U.S. government in an executive branch instituted war in Libya in contradiction of the plain text of the Constition reserving that function to Congress. They've merely rationalized the lawlessness by playing semantic games. What won't politicians do? None of them recognize any limits whatsoever on the power of government save for immediate political expedience. I don't know what it is in which you are grounding your faith in restraint. I agree that it is a matter of conjecture, of necessity. Who really knows to what audacity an ambitious pol will stoop before he does so? Nevertheless, I haven't seen Obama's supposed excellence as a Constitutional scholar slow him down much to this point.

[rick-day.livejournal.com]

Oh look at you, sitting all alone, throwing rocks at the wall.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Again, police actions justified by the UN were first invented by Harry S. Truman. Obama's hardly invented anything or done anything particularly different from his precursors at this point.

[montecristo.livejournal.com]

No, of course not, he's only piled on his small share of abuses and usurpations that have, taken together over the years, essentially worked to the same effect that there would have been had these actions been designed to reduce the people under absolute despotism. Who cares how much of whose fault each little nibble is attributable? In the long run, the end result is the same. Effectively, the executive branch no longer has any meaningful constitutional restraint upon the exercise of its power. Whatever any administration can get away with it will do. Obama's administration has effectively made war upon Libya without even a nod to the perrogatives of Congress. Regardless of how much of the slide is directly attributable to his administration the effect is a repudiation of the Constitution by government.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

See here I thought that Right-Wingers hated the War Powers Act. Damned if you, damned if you don't.

[montecristo.livejournal.com]

You've mistaken me for a "right-winger." I'm not, and I am surprised that this should surprise you. Actually though, I do object to the War Powers Act in one sense. It behaves as a rubber-stamp, an auto-permission given to the executive to play at war for ninety days. Effectively, is is defacto permission for the executive to commit acts of war, to actually start wars, and then back Congress into the "corner" of having to acknowledge the fait accompli or shut down U.S. military operations in the midst of active hostilities. It is a cowardly unconstitutional delegation of authority by a pack of politicians who do not want the responsibility that the Constitution puts on them.

Mostly though, the issue arises when the U.S. government tries to play a role its charter was specifically desingned to keep it from playing. Too many people want an empire. They foolishly believe that they can have their empire and their republic too. The framers of the Constitution knew better. Too many people see nothing wrong with "our government" putting on Sauron's Ring and playing "World's Policeman." The unintended consequences eventually catch up to every nation that has tried it.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

OK, I'll grant the first paragraph. I fail to see how Lord of the Rings is relevant to this argument.

[montecristo.livejournal.com]

My point, which I will concede was made obscurely, was that both the "right" and the "left" have totally lost their meanings due to acquiring too many conflicting definitions to be meaningful. It used to be "liberal" to oppose the ancient regime and the idea of aristocracy and opposed the state's domination of civil society. Now the term "big government liberal" is redundant. The right used to be synonymous with resisting the course of empire, the corruption of the republic, the collapse of liberty. Now, though, many of them have embraced the idea of "A Clash of Civilizations" and a new, grand, collectivist crusade in the name of social engineering that is now a staple of the left. The point I was trying to make is that both left and right have bought into the collectivist idea of statism and I am fundamentally of a different ideology than that. Because of that fundamental difference, people tend to presume that when I differ with their preferred expression of statist philosophy that I am obviously the opposite of their own ideology. To the "conservatives" of the warfare state mentality (including law-and-order drug warriors) I am a bleeding-heart liberal. To the democratic socialist left, I must be a right wing fascist. It doesn't occur to many that I am different in ideology than both of the presently popular political streams in the U.S., that I reject statism as such, as a counterproductive force (like the Ring in Tolkien's tale) in human relations. Many make the presumption though, that if I am not in favor of their own brand of statism then I must logically be in favor of the other faction's brand. Like all presumptions, it says more about the presumer than it does about the object of the presumptions. At any rate, I'm used to mischaracterizations. Politics is full of them, and nobody is entirely immune to making them at one point or another.