congress/president/obama/bush

[bricolage]

ok so this is a question for anyone who understands the political system in the US because I still have no idea. so I was reading this thing about how drones/troops/imprisonment and such under obama that democrats/liberals would have been up in arms about had it been under bush or a republican president but are happy to let slide under obama. a few of the comments though were from obama supporters saying that this wasn't a fair comparison as he was/is hamstrung by a republican congress and so can't do everything he wants. what i'm interested in is how this differs to the relationship between president and congress under bush when everyone was more than happy to blame everything that happened on the president. did he always have a majority (in both houses?) or was it much the same as it is now? also to what extent is obama able to do things of his own accord, so for example I've seen other people write about how drones are a presidential thing and don't even need to go through congress.

thanks to anyone that can help.

[subcp]

When Congress authorizes greater power to the Executive branch, they don't relinquish that power voluntarily. An example is the Taft-Hartley law, which gave the President the power to seek a national emergency injunction against a worker's strike- passed by a Republican Congress, it was a campaign promise of the Democratic candidate Truman that he would repeal the LMRA/Taft-Hartley; yet he didn't nor did any Democrat. Just like Obama campaigned on closing Gitmo etc. and hasn't done so. Power granted doesn't get taken back without a huge fight.

[Mackenzie_Blanc]

did he always have a majority (in both houses?) or was it much the same as it is now?

For the first six years of the Bush administration, he had a majority in the Senate and House. In the first two years, Obama had a democratic majority. But its still the same ruling class, with a different face.


also to what extent is obama able to do things of his own accord, so for example I've seen other people write about how drones are a presidential thing and don't even need to go through congress.

Considering that Obama has passed several executive orders, most recently gun control provisions, i'd say he can pretty much do what he wants. But the democrats are fucking hypocrites, Obama is following the same bullshit policies as Bush, but they aren't complaining are they?

[bricolage]

But its still the same ruling class, with a different face.
yeah, just to nip this in the bud, I'm not trying to argue anything different to this in terms of class relations, I'm just trying to work out the technicalities of the american political system.

thanks for the replies so far.

[Os Cangaceiros]

Yep G Dub had a pretty solid Republican legislature for the six years or so...scored pretty big in the 2002 mid-terms as I remember (you could practically hear Tom Daschel sobbing in the background during those), consolidated it in the 2004 elections, but by 2006 the electorate was sick of the GOP's shit so they elected the Democrats on an "anti-corruption"-type campaign, and Obama in 2008. Obama had a filibuster-proof majority in Congress for the first two years. But he lost it in 2010 when the fickle temperment of the electorate turned on the Democrats once again and people decided that they didn't like the Democrat's shit either.

[bricolage]

Yep G Dub had a pretty solid Republican legislature for the six years or so...scored pretty big in the 2002 mid-terms as I remember (you could practically hear Tom Daschel sobbing in the background during those), consolidated it in the 2004 elections, but by 2006 the electorate was sick of the GOP's shit so they elected the Democrats on an "anti-corruption"-type campaign, and Obama in 2008. Obama had a filibuster-proof majority in Congress for the first two years. But he lost it in 2010 when the fickle temperment of the electorate turned on the Democrats once again and people decided that they didn't like the Democrat's shit either.
cool that's what I wanted to know.
so to what extent does foreign policy stuff (troop deployments/troop increases/drone deployments) have to go through the legislature or to what extent can presidents use executive orders of their own?

[Os Cangaceiros]

Presidents have a lot of power regarding troop deployments, Obama can pretty much send troops wherever he wants.

Obama is seriously signing death warrants dude

[bricolage]

Presidents have a lot of power regarding troop deployments, Obama can pretty much send troops wherever he wants.

Obama is seriously signing death warrants dude
yeah that's what I thought.

[Red Commissar]

Regarding the troop deployments, the only thing the president is bound by is that a declaration of war can only be passed as a legislative measure. There is the War Powers Resolution which requires a legislative vote on the matter within 48 hours for a formal declaration of war (foreign policy measures originate in the Senate), otherwise the president is only entitled to have those troops deployed up to 60 days. Of course this is not always followed, as Reagan's intervention in El Salvador and Clinton's involvement in Kosovo were done with out a declaration of war.

Republicans have been going after Obama on the same logic with Libya, though paradoxically they were also the loudest for the US to intervene militarily in the country. So a lot of this is just political posturing.

The drone strike shit is basically completely done in the executive end. The released Department of Justice memo that started this conversation had some crazy stuff in there which basically said the executive could sign off on these attacks with no reporting to Congress or the legal system, even if they were American citizens, if they posed a threat to national security. Worse still the memo basically said there didn't actually need to be physical evidence, essentially even a "hunch" could be grounds to authorize a strike.

Typically the way politics work is that the party out of the White House will make a fuss over these things regardless of whether or not they'd do it too. Samething with their supporters who end up supporting these parties much in the same way a football ultra would in their teams for some reason. I'm sure it's the same with your tories and labor across the pond. So a lot of Democratic diehards have been trying to defend Obama on these charges because they can't comprehend that he's not substantially changed the foreign policy direction of the US from the Bush years. Republicans suffer from the same problem when they try to accuse Obama of being weak or insufficient on foreign policy because he's doing what Bush was doing.

It's idiotic when these guys claim that Obama's somehow being strong-armed into this because of obstructionist Republicans (who are, admittedly, doing a lot of media circus) and as such his views have been unfairly compromised. The ugly fact is that Obama, much like Clinton before him, is perfectly fine with this practice of compromise and centrist positions. The issue is of course the factor that an opposition party will create noise and mess as much as they can because they are interested in getting a bigger clout next election cycle, even if the president offers them what essentially is their views.

As for Bush and Congress, it was answered adequately by other users. It should be noted that when the Democrats got back control of Congress in 2006 they were fine working with Bush laws, AFAIK we weren't seeing this kind of nonsense and deadlock. I'm pretty sure this was because Democratic strategists were sure that a Democratic president would be easily elected because no Republican candidate would be able to run without the weight of the Bush years on them. What both progressive dems and teabagger republican types forget is that both parties in the loudly praised notions of bipartisianship voted in favor the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, passed the PATRIOT Act, and the bank bailout in the 2008 economic meltdown.

Democrat supporters and other liberal types will try to throw out every stop to ignore the fact that Obama is nowhere near as "progressive" as they may be or think he is. Teabaggers and lolbertarians in their incessetant ranting about "earners v. takers" and the deficit, forget that their prophet Reagan actually saw deficit levels rise and new taxes emerge in the form of payroll.