Three Loose Ends

In Saturday's New York Times Garry Wills refutes my argument about the Republic surviving a Clinton co-Presidency.

Although Wills admits that we currently have two Presidents, he says the Framers did not contemplate this, nor should we continue it:

James Wilson of Pennsylvania made the argument for a single officeholder with typical depth and precision: “To control the executive, you must unite it. One man will be more responsible than three. Three will contend among themselves till one becomes the master of his colleagues. In the triumvirates of Rome, first Caesar, then Augustus, are witnesses of this truth. The kings of Sparta and the consuls of Rome prove also the factious consequences of dividing the executive magistracy.”

Wills also complains that if Bill and Hillary act as two Presidents, that it would be hard to know who to impeach --- Nonsense. You impeach the elected official.

As a technical matter, there is a strong argument to be made that whenever one party controls the Congress, and the other party controls the Executive, that the Constitution almost expects that the President to be impeached as a matter of good housekeeping!

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Red Mind In A Blue State asks why Democratic voters would intentionlly elect people as antagonistic as the Clintons.

Paul Krugman says it better than I can

"Those who don’t want to nominate Hillary Clinton because they don’t want to return to the nastiness of the 1990s — a sizable group, at least in the punditocracy — are deluding themselves. Any Democrat who makes it to the White House can expect the same treatment: an unending procession of wild charges and fake scandals, dutifully given credence by major media organizations that somehow can’t bring themselves to declare the accusations unequivocally false (at least not on Page 1)."

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We also need to acknowledge that we will never fully secure our border until we create a lawful way for foreign workers to come here and support our economy

President Bush -- State of the Union, January 2009

I've long said that Bush could not possibly be our worst President. The honor goes to James Buchanan, who left the Presidency with fewer states then when he started.

But even Buchanan did not try to introduce slavery into states where it did not already exist.

There is a lot of support for a guest worker program, by liberals as well as conservatives, as part of a comprehensive immigration plan that "solves the immigration issue once and for all".

It seems like madness to me. Bush would greedily sign a guest worker program. No matter how widespread the support in the opposite of Progress, or even in the nation as a whole, Bush would bear history's burden for the destruction of American freedom. He would deserve the taint.

If Bush sneaks in a bill to re-create the conditions of second class citizenship that we struggled so many centuries to get rid of, then Bush would truly deserve the title of "Worst President Ever"