Condoleezza Rice Quotes
it is a longstanding principle that sitting national security advisers do not testify before the Congress.
Rice, Condoleezza. Interview by Ed Bradley. 60 Minutes, CBS, 28 Mar. 2004.
President George W. Bush, during the War on Terror, asserted the authority to contravene laws passed by Congress and signed by a previous president. He further, argued that he did not have to inform Congress when he ordered steps that broke the existing laws. His position was based on his claim that there were inherent Presidential powers in wartime granted by the Constitution and the Congress could not override the Constitution.
Vidal, a staunch liberal held this view along with many ultra conservatives end extreme liberals. The constitution requires the Congress to declare war, but they have not done so for any of the wars since WWII. The President assumed the war power. And the only coherent budgets began.
Jefferson and many others thought the original drafting of the Constitution was deficient in not explicitly protecting rights from the government. See {586024}. When it came time for ratification, it was clear that ratification would not take place unless that was remedied and the Bill of Rights made the ratification possible by satisfying many critics of whom Jefferson was but one. Note that the protection sought was from the President and the Congress.
His main reason for believing this is that all appropriations bills must be initiated by the House of Representatives. Lobbyists therefore often give the House more attention than the Senate.
In 1949 the NATO treaty was signed. There was concern that a phrase in the treaty authorizing signatories to take "such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force" would undermine Congress's powers:
The United States government had for many years deposited all its funds in a single private bank, the Bank of the United States. President Jackson, without congressional authorization, ordered the Federal deposits to be distributed among state banks instead. The Senate passed a resolution demanding a copy of the "paper" he had read to the cabinet ordering the change of practice:
Monroe was then Secretary of State.
Casey frequently withheld information from Congress that he was legally required to report, did things without Congressional authorization and often lied in his testimony and reports to Congress.
Condoleezza "Condi" Rice is an American diplomat, political scientist, civil servant, and professor who is the current director of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Rice served as the 66th United States Secretary of State from 2005 to 2009 and as the 20th United States National Security Advisor from 2001 to 2005. A member of the Republican Party, Rice was the first female African-American secretary of state and the first woman to serve as National Security Advisor. Until the election of Barack Obama as president in 2008, Rice and her predecessor, Colin Powell, were the highest-ranking African Americans in the history of the federal executive branch (by virtue of the secretary of state standing fourth in the presidential line of succession).
