Senator Doesn’t Know How Many Czars There Are
If a member of the United States Senate, you know, serving in a branch of government which is supposed to be overseeing the executive branch, doesn’t know how many czars there are, that suggests these officials are operating without adequate legislative oversight.
Over at Nice Deb’s blog, I chanced upon this statement from Tennessee Senator Lamar Alexander:
Commenting on the same video, Ed Morrissey observes that the GOP has begun to pushback on czars, starting “in the Senate, the legislative body Barack Obama has bypassed with his proliferation of unaccountable commissars in government.“
Morrissey links a Washington Post op-ed by Alexander’s colleague from Texas, Kay Bailey Hutchison, who raises the constitutional question:
Unfortunately — and in direct contravention of the Framers’ intentions — virtually no one can say with certainty what these individuals do or what limits are placed on their authority. We don’t know if they are influencing or implementing policy. We don’t know if they possess philosophical views or political affiliations that are inappropriate or overreaching in the context of their work.
This is precisely the kind of ambiguity the Framers sought to prevent. Article One tasks the legislative branch with establishing federal agencies, defining what they do, determining who leads them and overseeing their operations. Article Two requires the president to seek the advice and consent of the Senate when appointing certain officials to posts of consequence. Thus, authority is shared between government branches, guaranteeing the American people transparency and accountability.
Let’s bring this issue into the light–and not just for the sake of the Constitution, whose 222nd birthday we celebrate tomorrow, but also for the sake of the transparency Barack Obama promised in his campaign and still touts on the White House website.
12 Comments
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
How many Tsars has Obama stuffed into our government ?
I want the titles of their offices and their names !
Thank you,
Comment by Bill Bulger — September 16, 2009 @ 6:52 am - September 16, 2009
Three of the Czars received confirmation votes. Hutchison voted for one of the three Czars. I appreciate her op-ed but she is trying to get traction on something against real conservative Rick Perry and she is not the best person to carry our banner since she voted for a third of the Czars that were confirmed.
Comment by Wild Manchee — September 16, 2009 @ 8:07 am - September 16, 2009
Not “CZARS”……”COMMISSARS”! We have made an awful mistake accepting the sobriquet “czar” when Obama has gone the route of pre-1946 Russia by loading his shadow Politiburo with Political Commissars who are to carry the agenda and reeducate the bureaucracy. The original Russian Commissars were political appointees who kept a tight thumb on the military leadership and whose approval was equal to the command structure. Obama is appointing Political Commissars to go out into the bureaucracy and community organize them. The bureaucracy is fairly easy to warp from within. All the laws that protect it from politics are aimed at its Congressionally approved leadership. There is nothing to stop an ACORN/SEIU community organizing Political Commissar from building cells and shaping the bureaucracy from the ground up. All that is needed is an entry pass.
Much of the lower level bureaucracy is staffed by people you find at the DMV. They have a job for life and they become a cog in system very easily. Organizing them is child’s play if all you have to do is “go along to get along.”
Obama is out whipping up the unions and giving campaign speeches to the “yes we can” crowd as an answer to the 912 marchers. He is going after the “little man” in a class envy war on the status quo. That is his game, his game plan and the purpose of the Political Commissars.
During his election campaign Obama said that “the economy grows from the ground up.” That defies capitalism. People do not seek jobs from the unemployed. But if you round up all the “little people” and put them on the government payroll (think California) you can overwhelm the economy with government employees. The state health care system in England is among the three largest employers in the world. They are paid by the taxpayers.
Political Commissars are critical to manage the quick evolution from a command economy to a statist economy. Having them answer to Congress or the Constitution is stupid. They answer to the Community Organizer in Chief. There are no “czars.” No Politburo ever had czars. Alinsky and Chicago Politics are not secrets. This all about pure power and nothing less.
Comment by heliotrope — September 16, 2009 @ 11:10 am - September 16, 2009
You know, you people are morons getting dumber each day by listening to the fanatical rantings of your either uniformed or deliberately misleading pundits.
“Czar” is an unofficial title for adviser officials serving in the administration focusing on a specific subject area. The practice was begun with the Reagan administration calling a title a “czar” and has continued to present time. The title has nothing to do with a more traditional reading of the word except in designating someone as the head of a particular advisory area. These roles are specific, have titles and staff and their roles are easy to understand if any of you would actually take the time to inquire instead of deliberately assuming it was something nefarious from the “socialist” (or Maoist, or communist or fascist or whatever “ist” you’ve designated our President is at any particular moment like they’re interchangeable) administration.
And I suppose none of you are concerned that in the Bush administration there were at least as many “czars” as there are in the current administration?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._executive_branch_czars
Comment by Countervail — September 16, 2009 @ 11:54 am - September 16, 2009
Speaking of dumber by the day, did you even bother to read your own source, Countervail?
Comment by ThatGayConservative — September 16, 2009 @ 3:05 pm - September 16, 2009
Utah Senator Bob Bennett, have sent a letter to the White House, concern-trolling over the existence of “czars.” This is all a part of the latest silly-season campaign in which people pretend to have no idea of the longstanding tradition of presidents enlisting the service of experts to manage a specific portfolio and/or proffer advice on a particular subject of concern (to which the media appends the shorthand “czar”). This was never a matter of real concern until opposition to the White House required opponents to fully embrace the paranoid style of American politics. But that’s the way we live now — fully deranged.
Bennett goes on to suggest that they had “identified at least ‘18′ czar positions” that he feels are doing the lion’s share of the Constitutional undermining. The letter does not include any such list so it’s hard to know exactly to whom Bennett et al are referring. However, having purported to have eliminated “positions established by law” and positions subject to Senate confirmation, we can eliminate the following people from the original Politico list of “czars.”
CONFIRMED:
Alan Bersin
Gil Kerlikowske
Cass Sunstein
Herb Allison
Aneesh Chopra
Ashton Carter
John Holdren
POSITIONS CREATED BY CONGRESS:
Vivek Kundra
Earl Devaney
In addition, many of the positions that Politico listed as “czars” cannot possibly be undermining Constitutional authority because the Constitution has ably survived the appointments that President George W. Bush made to the same positions. These include:
Story continues below
Joshua DuBois, who, like John Diluio, Jim Towey, and Jay Hein, will serve as the director of the White House Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships.
George Mitchell, who, like General Anthony C. Zinni, will serve as the special envoy to the Middle East.
J. Scott Gration, who, like Senator John Danforth, Andrew Natsios, and Richard S. Williamson, will serve as the special envoy to Sudan.
John Brennan, who, like Senator Tom Ridge, Frances Townsend, and Ken Wainstein, will serve as the assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism (a position the Bush created).
Richard Holbrooke, who, like Zalmay Khalilizad, will serve as the special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Jeffrey Crowley, who, like Joseph O’Neill, will be the director of the Office of National AIDS Policy.
Ron Bloom, appointed as President Obama’s senior counselor for manufacturing policy, follows in the precedent established by the Bush White House, who appointed Albert Frink as the “manufacturing czar” in 2004.
Additionally, consider the following:
Paul Volcker: Politico seems to think Volcker is the “Economic Czar.” He’s actually the president of the Economic Recovery Board. He is a former chairman of the Federal Reserve.
Daniel Fried: Thought of as the “Guantanamo Closure Czar,” he was uncontroversially known as the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs in the Bush administration. As far as Guantanamo closure goes, the issue is deeply controversial, but since the Congress has demonstrated the wherewithal to delay and obstruct legislation over the matter, it’s hard to see where all the Constitutional undermining is happening.
Carol Browner: Browner is the Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change, and was formerly vetted and confirmed by the U.S. Senate when she was appointed to the EPA.
Gary Samore: Samore is appointed to serve as the chief adviser to the president on WMD proliferation and terrorism. This position was established in the 9/11 Commission Recommendations bill, which became law in 2007. Bush simply never filled the position.
Todd Stern: He is called the “international climate czar,” but this term is just made up out of whole cloth. Stern is a State Department envoy who “represent[s] the United States internationally at the Ministerial level in all bilateral and multilateral negotiations regarding climate change.”
Once you eliminate all the appointments that don’t fit the Bennett group’s own criteria and which beg for a thorough reassessment of the senators’ credibility, here’s who you are left with on the original Politico list:
Ed Montgomery: Director of Recovery for Auto Communities and Workers. Montgomery was a former Deputy Secretary of the Department of Labor in the Clinton administration.
Dennis Ross: Member of the National Security Council, where he serves as the Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for the “Central Region,” which refers to the Middle East and South Asia.
Lynn Rosenthal: White House Adviser on Violence Against Women, an issue on which Vice President Joe Biden aims to place a greater focus in the Obama administration. It’s really difficult to see how Rosenthal could put the nation into a Constitutional crisis.
Adolfo Carrion, Jr.: Serves as the Director of the White House Office of Urban Affairs Policy, a portfolio that the Obama administration created and which sounds suspiciously like something that might not exclusively benefit white people!
Kenneth Feinberg: Feinberg was appointed to oversee the compensation of executives at firms that receive federal bailout money. As you might surmise, he’s having a tremendous impact reining in Wall Street salaries.
Nancy-Ann DeParle: Director of the newly-created White House Office of Health Reform. As you may have surmised by reading even a single newspaper from this past summer, she hasn’t exactly succeeded at strong-arming the Congress into doing the White House’s bidding.
Cameron Davis: Uhm… the White House has an initiative to clean up the Great Lakes, and Cameron Davis is tasked with overseeing this initiative. I bet most of you figured that when the fall of the U.S. Constitution came, it would come via this position.
See, once you start actually examining these positions in a reality-based way, it’s hard to know where Bennett and his colleagues derive their eighteen-member list and even harder to determine how, precisely, any of these people imperil the Constitution. But all of that’s beside the point. “Czars” have been with us since the Nixon White House and the previous administration had a crap-ton of them about whom none of these Senators, to my recollection, ever complained. It’s hard to look at the efforts of Senator Bennett and his colleagues as anything other than the ministrations of people who simply have no idea what they are even talking about. Hopefully, their concerns will be answered in a letter from the White House Sarcasm Czar.
Comment by Truth Czar — September 17, 2009 @ 9:12 am - September 17, 2009
bushco had 6 more “czars” than obama. enough said.
Comment by buckeyenutlover — September 17, 2009 @ 9:22 am - September 17, 2009
Wanna provide a source for that, buckeye?
Comment by B. Daniel Blatt — September 17, 2009 @ 10:51 am - September 17, 2009
The Brainroom counts 32 czars in the Obama administration, based on media reports from reputable sources that have identified the official in question as a czar. http://www.glennbeck.com/content/articles/article/198/29391/
dancing with the czars. . .DNC
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXy-vPN_i7A
that’s what I found DBD
Comment by rusty — September 17, 2009 @ 3:14 pm - September 17, 2009
sorry, bush had three more czars than obama (not six as stated before)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._executive_branch_czars
it’s just another pathetic attempt of the gop to manufacture outrage over absolutely nothing.
Comment by buckeyenutlover — September 17, 2009 @ 3:23 pm - September 17, 2009
sorry that should be BDB. . .not DBD
Comment by rusty — September 17, 2009 @ 3:29 pm - September 17, 2009
To rebut my critics who offer left-wing talking points on the czars, I offer this from Jennifer Rubin, full of links:
Comment by B. Daniel Blatt — September 17, 2009 @ 11:45 pm - September 17, 2009