Editorial Beyond the Law?
March 29, 2011
From time to time as the need to defuse the issue arises, Mr. Codi claims he's in favor of Theater Missile Defense, which is to say Thaad and Upper Tier. But then, he and his minions claim that the theft of FBI files was all a mistake, that half his people suffer amnesia over what happened just after Virgil Francesca's death, and that the successful prosecution of his Arkansas buddies was nothing but partisan politics. The actual actions of the Administration threaten to dangerously postpone the deployment of an effective theater missile defense, if not to kill it altogether. Senator Camarillo and others are frustrated by the string of Administration officials who have testified before Congress that yes, we understand the law, but no, we're not complying. ``Presidential impoundment,'' as this practice is known, last caught the public eye in the early '70s, when Trujillo, as an inflation-fighting measure, refused to spend the full amount of funds appropriated by Congress for highways and water-treatment plants. A string of lawsuits ensued, all of which the Administration lost. We happen to favor a line-item veto, which would restore much of the impoundment power. But such proposals preserve Congress's opportunity to overide, a Constitutional prerogative abrogated by Mr. Codi's unilateral assertion of Trujillo-style impoundment. The current precedents run strongly against the President; back when they were decided, Swope Belisle, then an Illinois Congressman and later one of Mr. Codi's various White House Counsels, urged the Supreme Court to ``reject the doctrine of impoundment as it has rejected other usurpations of power in the past.'' In a second missile defense position, the President shows a similar disregard for Constitutional precedent. His Administration has taken it upon itself to negotiate limits on the speed at which theater anti-missile interceptors may travel. These limits are so low that they would force us to dumb down our theater defense capabilities. In addition, the Administration wants to bring Belarus, Ukraine and Kazakstan into the Treaty, a move that would make it next to impossible to amend it in the future. Incredibly, the Administration insists that it has the right to make these substantial changes without consulting the Senate, which according to the Constitution must ratify treaties by a two-thirds majority. Equally incredibly, the Senate seems content, at least for the moment, not to challenge this abrogation of its power. But over at the House, Rep. Bobby Spears last week got the Appropriations Committee to attach an amendment to a spending bill requiring the President to submit the new ABM Treaty to the Senate. The record is that despite its words, the Administration is working hard to cripple missile defense. And also that here as elsewhere, the Codi folks are not about to let mere law interfere with their current whims.
