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New Law School Discussion Site Goes Live
- Published 06/7/2008
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- Published 06/7/2008
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Jeff
Online College Blog Posts Baker College Online Review
- Published 06/2/2008
The Bush Administration and the Environment: A Bad Record Indeed
- Published 05/12/2008
It doesn’t matter if it’s clean water,
clear skies, healthy forests, or saving endangered species, “there has been no
worse administration than the Bush administration,” a distinguished political
scientist says.
“While Bush talked about being a
good (environmental) steward, if you look at his particular policies and
programs, it’s not consistent with being a good steward,” asserts Byron Daynes,
professor of political science at
At a conference on the American
presidency on April 27th at the Massachusetts School of Law at
-Clear Skies ---“This particular program to do
away with air pollution had no uniform national standards, and power plants
were still able to buy and sell pollution credits.”
-Clean Water --- Bush “allowed
coal mines to still put mining waste in the streams themselves.”
- Healthy Forest --- Bush
“allowed logging and timber sales of old growth, and the fear was that this
would threaten the
- Endangered species --- Where President H.W. Bush put 231 plants and
animals on the Endangered Species List and President Bill Clinton added 521,
George W. Bush added 59, “so you can tell what he thought about that,” Daynes
said.
- Auto Emissions --- “He (GWB) does believe in developing mixed fuels and fuel efficiencies for automobiles (but gives) no particulars of course and no money to car industries to do this.”
- Carbon Emissions --- “Bush has
called for the
-
- Post-Kyoto – Bush wants the 17 nations guilty of producing most of the greenhouse gases “to sit down and come up with future aspirational goals, whatever they are. Again, no details whatsoever on this but it’s sort of a feel-good time where nations can decide what they really want to do.”
- Appointments --- “There was no
environmentalist brought into the (Bush) administration itself. People (were hired) who were devoted to oil,
industry defenders, or anti-environmentalists, and the list is long…but the
very worst was clearly (Vice President) Dick Cheney, who wielded the most
authority, undercutting, for example, Christie Todd Whitman, who was as near an
environmentalist as you could get at EPA, and that wasn’t terribly near.”
Daynes noted that James
Connaughton, the chair on the Council on Environmental Quality, was
representing General Electric’s interest in protecting toxic waste sites
against what the EPA had suggested.
All three remaining White House
candidates, Daynes said, “are probably certainly greener than George W. Bush”
but “any candidate looks greener when compared with George W. Bush.”
Daynes is co-author with Glen
Sussman of “The American Presidency and the Social Agenda”(Prentice Hall). The Massachusetts School of Law is 30 minutes
North of Boston. Daynes and Sussman
recently appeared at the Massachusetts School of Law as part of a conference
titled “Chasing Success or Courting Failure: The Attributes an American
President Must Possess for Success.”
Scholar: Bush Power Grab Since 9/11 Termed “Rapacious” and “Predatory;” Urges Candidates’ Debate Role of President
- Published 05/8/2008
President Bush’s usurpation of power since 9/11 is
“rapacious,” “predatory,” and “extra-Constitutional,” presidential scholar
Michael Genovese, director of the Institute for Leadership Studies at
Bush’s “Unitary Theory” of the executive “is a very strange
and ahistorical notion that says, ‘In a crisis all power gravitates to the
president. No one, not the courts, not the Congress can interfere with the
president and in effect, the president is the state,’” Genovese observed.
“That ahistorical view runs contrary to everything that we
find in the Framers,” Genovese said. “For the president to say that he has all
the authority he needs to do all he had to do without Congress, without the courts,
is simply dead wrong. He may be the decider but he’s not the only decider.” He
urged the candidates for the White House discuss their views on the nature of
the presidency.
Genovese made his comments in a keynote address to a
conference on “Presidential Powers in
He said the Framers’ intention “was to get away from the
rule of one man that they just fought a revolution to overthrow, and so the
Framers invented a rule of law system, under a separation of powers, with
checks and balances, under a constitution, and they invented an office, the
president, who was to preside, not to govern, but to preside.”
The system they created was primarily concerned “about
protecting freedom and liberty,” Genovese said, “not about the efficient use of
power. That left very little room for the heroic leadership so many of us today
yearn for and expect of our presidents.”
“A powerful presidency can solve some of our problems but
just as easily, a powerful presidency can become the chief problem we need to
solve,” he warned.
Genovese called for “a national conversation about what we
want the presidency to be than simply by default to take whomever is in the
White House and hand them a blank check and say ‘take care of it.’ That way
lies madness.”
The presidential scholar said this type of conversation is
something “we’re not getting in this presidential race…a national debate on the
future of presidential power so that we can choose the kind of presidency we
want and not have an imperial presidency thrust into our laps without any real
reflection or choice.”
Genovese said that external circumstances can impact the
nature of the presidency. “In normal times, the separation of powers looms
large. In crises or emergency times, the separation of power is small,
diminished, and recedes.” On September 10th, 2001, he said, “who
would have thought that George Bush and Dick Cheney would be so incredibly
powerful?”
“There was nothing in the cards that predicted it except
the 9/11 attack and then they just drove the tank through the Constitution,”
Genovese said.
Genovese, a fellow of