The Framers are spinning in their graves.

Let there no longer be any doubt. President Bush sees Congress as merely a nuisance not worth bothering about – except when it is rubber-stamping his agenda. When it refuses to give him what he wants – even forbids him to act – he proceeds anyway.

Last Friday, he signed a bill that would outlaw torture, put the pen down and openly declared that his intention to violate the law he had just signed. No one can stop him from torturing prisoners.

Earlier this week, he waited until Congress was out of session to install 15 top administration officials via recess appointment. These candidates were so weak that they wouldn’t pass muster in Senate hearings – even from his lapdog fellow Republicans.

Of course, the most egregious abuse of presidential power that has come to light so far is Mr. Bush’s violation of FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. He deliberately disobeyed FISA by placing warrantless wiretaps on U.S. citizens at the rate of 500 calls per day for three years or more.

If this were a normal presidency, the country would be in the midst of a Constitutional crisis right now. But President Bush faces no credible opposition in his quest for power so he does as he pleases.

The only group in the Capitol that could stop him – the Republican leadership in Congress – is complicit with him. George Bush is as addicted to power as he is to whiskey and coke. The GOP leaders are his enablers. They have given this reckless bungler a blank check, literally and figuratively, to run the world as he sees fit.

While the Democrats in Congress stand by helplessly, muted by the Rightwing Noise Machine and their own self-doubts, unable to get a photo-op in edgewise, normal Americans watch in horror as the imperial republic morphs into a Republican empire before our eyes.

Noblesse Oblige

Mr. Bush can’t help himself. Trampling the rights of the common folk is what aristocrats do, for heaven’s sake. He is hardly the first blueblood to neutralize a legislative assembly in his march to absolute power. Hell, Julius Caesar wasn’t even the first.

But it was never supposed to happen here.

The fact is, the president can only over-reach as far as the congressional leaders will allow. The Constitution charges the people’s representatives with oversight on the Executive – not in order to pester an administration with frivolous investigations – but rather as a safeguard against tyranny.

Since 2000, when George W. Bush assumed the presidency, Republicans on the Hill have taken the view that their constitutional oversight mandate is merely a “suggestion” from the Framers, not a requirement under the law.

The list of uninvestigated Bush Administration scandals is staggering: from deliberately violating FISA to mishandling Katrina, from lying about and/or bungling the evidence for war to leaking the name of a CIA spy and the subsequent cover-up, from the billions of taxpayer dollars missing in Iraq to Cheney’s Enron-designed energy plan to black prisons, prisoner rendition and torture – and on and on.

When it comes to the Judicial Branch, Republicans demand strict interpretation of the Constitution (when it suits their aims). But when it comes to the duties of the Legislative Branch, they treat the Constitution like it is just another musty document “rendered quaint” by terrorists on 9/11.