(1) (of 2) Congressional Overreaching. Congress is not superior to the Presidency. The Supreme Court is not superior to the Presidency. If anything, among the three legalistically co-equal branches of the Federal Government, the Presidency is supreme as a practical matter, because the Executive Branch includes the ARMED FORCES. It is commonplace throughout history that overreaching legislatures and courts have found to their dismay that a chief executive holds all the marbles. Some of those overreaching fools have found themselves face down on a chopping block, or standing with a blindfold on, in front of a firing squad.
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In the United States we have not (yet) had a military coup, but it really is not beyond the realm of possibility. Andrew Jackson was told by the Supreme Court in 1832 that he 'could not' expel the Cherokees from their traditional lands in the Southeast. He in effect told the Supreme Court to go f*k itself and found a way to send the Cherokees on the "Trail of Tears".
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Congress does not have the right to compel the President or any other member of the Executive Branch to testify before Congress. Period. If Congress is unhappy with the Executive Branch, it can cut off funding to whatever it disapproves of, or impeach him or any other member of the Executive Branch:

The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.

U.S. Constitution, Article II, Section 4. That is all that Congress is entitled to do.
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The President is entitled, of necessity, to staff the top executive positions of every part of the Executive Branch as ever he wishes, subject only to confirmation of major appointments by the Senate. How else can he govern? You can't have subordinates who don't do what you tell them to do, or do it badly or incompetently.
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No outsider is authorized to second-guess staffing decisions within the Executive Branch, and the President needs to tell everyone outside the White House to shut the hell up and mind their own business.
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The people get to judge the President once every four years. Congress can cut funding to the Department of Justice if they're unhappy with its current leadership, and impeach the Attorney General or President if it thinks he has committed a crime. At the impeachment trial that follows, we can see if the impeached executive wishes to deliver the information the Congress wants, in his defense.
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The courts, however, have absolutely no jurisdiction of any kind over the Executive Branch, so cannot take sides in a power struggle between Congress and the Presidency. Bush, and every President, has an absolute obligation to defend the Presidency against partisan attempts to weaken it. And Democrats who aspire to recapture the Presidency should certainly not want that institution weakened by Congressional assaults, because a Democratic President can easily find himself (yes, HIMself) facing off against a Republican Congress.
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The Framers of the Constitution attempted to create three separate and co-equal branches of government, with a slite edge given to Congress, which can pass laws over the veto of the President. The President can, however, simply fail or refuse to enforce a law he disapproves of, and there is nothing Congress can do to compel enforcement except impeach.
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The Framers deliberately gave almost no power to the Supreme Court (as Alexander Hamilton explained in Federalist Paper No. 78), and the extreme power grabbed by that Court has no constitutional warrant. One remedy to Judicial overreaching, however, does lie within the Constitution. Congress can pass legislation that courts may not review (Article III, Section 2). Congress has almost never done that, tho I seem to recall some recent antigay measure in which it did attach such a provision. It would be much better if we were to amend the Constitution to provide a means by which Congress and the President, acting together, or Congress alone, acting by supermajority, can overrule any Supreme Court decision, for any reason, any time. No such amendment has yet been passed, nor even introduced.
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If Congress and the Judiciary think they can order the President around and reduce the Executive Branch to a slave of the Legislative and Judicial Branches, someone should remind them of this remark.

When told the Pope [Pius XI] thought Stalin should stop repressing Catholics under his yoke, Stalin famously asked, "The Pope? How many divisions has he got?"

How many divisions has Congress or the Supreme Court got? Moral suasion and appeal to legalities are as nothing as against military force.
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A powerful and insistent President can get his way, by hook or by crook, in almost any system. In Venezuela recently, Hugo Chavez got permission from the legislature to rule by decree! In U.S. history, Andrew Jackson was unhappy with a Supreme Court ruling that barred the expulsion of the Cherokees from East of the Mississippi. He declared:

"John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it."

(Jackson gets my vote for our very worst President ever, and not just for the "Trail of Tears", for which he was responsible, even tho the forced removal of the Cherokees to Oklahoma actually took place under Van Buren. Jackson also not only allowed but actually facilitated the British invasion of the "Falkland Islands" (which we should call the "Malvinas", like "Marianas") in flagrant violation of the Monroe Doctrine, which warned European powers not to establish new colonies in the Americas. Thanks to Jackson, we made tens of millions of enemies for ourselves in Latin America almost 150 years later, when the British Empire, by then just a ragtag collection of scattered islands, committed war crimes in defense of the 'freedom' of that COLONY, and the U.S. stood idly by, effectively siding with British imperialism against a fellow American republic.)
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In any case, Jackson sidestepped the Supreme Court's ruling by simply arranging to have a tiny minority of Cherokees sign a treaty they had no authority to sign, which consented to removal to Oklahoma, and then having the Senate ratify it. There's always a way for a powerful President — or dictator — to get his way.
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President Bush is so rarely right on anything that it is a delite, if not an astonishment, that he is ever right. But he is right, here. He should go on the offensive, as with a short, concise national TV address to this effect:

Congress is provoking a Constitutional crisis that threatens to distract us from the work the Federal Government needs to do at home and abroad. Congress is not — repeat, NOT — the superior of the Executive Branch. It has no authority to run the White House, nor the Department of Justice, nor any other Executive agency. That is the President's job. Nor should Democrats want to weaken the President vis-à-vis Congress if ever they hope to control the White House themselves. Because a Democratic President could easily find himself facing an Imperial Congress controlled by militant Republicans who frustrate every Democratic initiative. Is that what we want, for the separate branches of Government to step all over each other and paralyze Government?
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If Democrats in Congress want a showdown, they can have a showdown. If Congress feels it is entitled to run the Executive Branch, maybe I should just start legislating. Would Congress like me to introduce bills in the Cabinet, and upon approval by the Cabinet, sign them into law, then enforce them? Perhaps the first bill I should introduce is a measure to arrest and imprison Members of Congress who attempt to subpena White House staff. And the second act of Presidential legislation could establish a separate court system not under the control of Congress nor subject to review by the Supreme Court. Such behavior would not be authorized by the Constitution? So what? Congress seems to think the Constitution doesn't matter, and it can assert superiority over the Executive Branch. Two can play at that game.
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We are asked today to judge who is wiser, the Framers of the Constitution, who created three separate branches of Government, or the current Democratic majority in Congress. I have no trouble deciding that case: the Framers were very wise men, the current partisan snipers in Congress are fools.
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As I hope I have just brought home, Congress has no more right to run the Executive Branch than the President has to pass laws without Congress. Indeed, if Congress asserts the right to run the Presidency, why should I not assert the right to sidestep Congress and rule by Executive Order? I don't have to pass new laws, just rule by Executive Order that makes no reference to Congress's rules or, as the Declaration of Independence put it about another overreacher, King George I, "Acts of pretended Legislation".
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I would remind Congress that the President is the commander-in-chief of the armed forces of the United States, a very large and very powerful body. The President can defend the White House from a few Federal Marshals sent by Congress, all within the ordinary construction of the Constitution. But the President is entitled, indeed obligated, to interpret the Constitution as he understands it, and enlarge the powers of the Presidency in times of crisis. Congress should not be eager to find out how far the President can enlarge the powers of the President in times of crisis.
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Throughout history, people of extreme views have forced a confrontation from which they then suffered catastrophically. Many republics have seen their institutions destroyed in power struggles. Altho we would like to think ourselves immune from such an outcome, we are not.

(2) World's Tallest Man? Media proclaimed that "the world's tallest man" got married today. Oh?
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An April 17, 2004 AP story in USA Today, and a documentary I later saw on television, state plainly that Leonid Stadnik, a man in the Ukraine, is well over 8 feet tall. Why, then, are media today claiming that a [7' 9" tall] man in China is the world's tallest? Wikipedia says of Stadnik:

Assuming Leonid stopped growing in 2006, pictures taken of him in Early 2007 standing next to Dr. Jim Sperber who is 5 ft 10 in (1.78 m), give us a good estimate of his height at 7 ft 10 in (2.4 m). This would put him above Bao, but still below other claimants not verified by Guinness, such as Sultan Kosen at 8 ft 1 in (2.46 m) of Turkey. * * *

[Guiness says] Leonid Stadnyk refuses to be measured by us. We have been told that it is because he doesn't want to court publicity — yet he continues to claim to be the tallest. Unfortunately we can only conclude due to previous experience, that he refuses to be measured officially by us because he is not the height he claims to be.

There are medical records for Mr. Stadnik, whose growth was finally stopped by treatments by an American doctor [Sperber, as above]. Don't those records state Stadnik's height unambiguously and authoritatively? In any case, it seems to me that a certain caution is warranted in reports about the world's tallest man. Tho Bao Xishun is recognized by Guinness, a brewery is not the world's repository of unassailable truth.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,611 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 8:08 PM