King George W.: James Madison's Nightmare

By Robert Scheer, Truthdig. Posted July 18, 2007.

In 1795, James Madison wrote of war's far-reaching and corrosive effect on public liberty. He could well have been warning us about our own King George, just the sort of imperial president that Madison and other founders of our nation feared most.

George W. Bush is the imperial president that James Madison and other founders of this great republic warned us about. He lied the nation into precisely the "foreign entanglements" that George Washington feared would destroy the experiment in representative government, and he has championed a spurious notion of security over individual liberty, thus eschewing the alarms of Thomas Jefferson as to the deprivation of the inalienable rights of free citizens. But most important, he has used the sledgehammer of war to obliterate the separation of powers that James Madison enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.

With the "war on terror," Bush has asserted the right of the president to wage war anywhere and for any length of time, at his whim, because the "terrorists" will always provide a convenient shadowy target. Just the "continual warfare" that Madison warned of in justifying the primary role of Congress in initiating and continuing to finance a war -- the very issue now at stake in Bush's battle with Congress.