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The people we elect aren’t the ones calling the shots, says Tufts University’s Michael Glennon. Others at SN have also voiced similar opinions so I thought this might be an interesting read for our members.
The voters who put Barack Obama in office expected some big changes. From the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping to Guantanamo Bay to the Patriot Act, candidate Obama was a defender of civil liberties and privacy, promising a dramatically different approach from his predecessor.
But six years into his administration, the Obama version of national security looks almost indistinguishable from the one he inherited. Guantanamo Bay remains open. The NSA has, if anything, become more aggressive in monitoring Americans. Drone strikes have escalated. Most recently it was reported that the same president who won a Nobel Prize in part for promoting nuclear disarmament is spending up to $1 trillion modernizing and revitalizing America’s nuclear weapons.
Why did the face in the Oval Office change but the policies remain the same? Critics tend to focus on Obama himself, a leader who perhaps has shifted with politics to take a harder line. But Tufts University political scientist Michael J. Glennon has a more pessimistic answer: Obama couldn’t have changed policies much even if he tried.
Though it’s a bedrock American principle that citizens can steer their own government by electing new officials, Glennon suggests that in practice, much of our government no longer works that way. In a new book, “National Security and Double Government,” he catalogs the ways that the defense and national security apparatus is effectively self-governing, with virtually no accountability, transparency, or checks and balances of any kind. He uses the term “double government”: There’s the one we elect, and then there’s the one behind it, steering huge swaths of policy almost unchecked. Elected officials end up serving as mere cover for the real decisions made by the bureaucracy.
[Related]: ‘National Security and Double Government’
(Score: 2) by arslan on Tuesday October 21 2014, @11:01PM
Didn't he fire some folks? All that did was put in place new folks that are _still_ in the pocket of those behind the scenes. I believe the point of this article here is that those behind the scenes are not the ones in office so you can't "fire" them.
(Score: 2) by Leebert on Tuesday October 21 2014, @11:57PM
There is a management structure. Assuming the President issues legal orders, then somewhere down that management chain, political appointee or not, someone is either not following orders from above, in which case they can be fired for insubordination, or they are not subject to the organizational structure of the Executive branch due to some exception in legislation that was passed by the Congress.
Let's say it's the latter. Once again, our President has not used his office to its full ability to fix the problem. The Constitution specifically give the President one of these responsibilities in Article II, Section 3:
Has the President used the State of the Union for something other than a prime-time fashion gala (or, heck, at any point he so chooses to address the Congress, since "from time to time" isn't exactly schedule prescriptive); specifically, insisted that Congress fix such a hypothetical problem? If not, then it either doesn't exist, or again, the President has failed to take the action that he could have taken.
Can you help me understand how else such nefarious actors in government could be shielded from Presidential action?