LORD KNOWS who kissed them, but members of Congress, like Sleeping Beauty, are beginning to wake from their long sleep. Unlike Sleeping Beauty, some of them are waking up cranky.
Bless cranky Sen. Arlen Specter, a transplanted Kansan who represents Pennsylvania. On Tuesday, he lectured the president on the limits of executive power.
The president has long insisted that, when it comes to the war in Iraq, “I am the decider.” Recently, perhaps having been told that the statement sounds a bit truculent and childish, George Bush has amended the statement to “I am the decision-maker.”
Specter is a Republican who has been in the Senate long enough to remember that, once upon a time, senators were treated with respect by the occupant of the Oval Office. Presidents consulted senators — especially senators of their own party — on important issues.
This administration has never had much use for Congress, except as a convenient rubber stamp for the wishes of the president, the vice president and Karl Rove. For six years, Congress has allowed the president to have his own way in many things. The result has been a great deal of fumbling and mischief as the executive branch has tried to order the world to its own wishes.
At Tuesday’s hearing on the war powers of Congress, Specter pointed out that the would-be emperor, strutting about and insisting on his right to rule alone, was wearing no clothes.
“I would suggest respectfully to the president,” Specter said, “that he is not the sole decider. The decider is a shared and joint responsibility.”
Specter was only stating a simple constitutional truth. It is a measure of the depth of recent congressional lethargy that the statment was seen by some observers as not only newsworthy, but downright revolutionary.
Specter is awake and seems determined to be a senator. If enough of his colleagues wake up and do the same, the president will cease to be the decider and become just a president again.
That would be good for the country.
After all, in real life, just as the fairy tale, there cannot be a happy ending until Sleeping Beauty wakes up.
Patrick S. Kelley
Editorial Page Editor