On today's "This Week with George Stephanopoulos," the deep-thinking Stephanopoulos had as a guest New Mexico Governor and Presidential wannabe Bill Richardson, who also served in the Clinton administration as an ambassador to the UN and as Secretary of Energy. Just so Richarson knows that Mr. S does not see him as a serious contender for the nomination, he as Richardson if he instead would consider a run for the Senate in 2008 not once but two different times.
During the entire interview, Mr. S asked him about his plan to get the troops out of Iraq immediately, about losing a key supporter in South Carolina, and a host of other process-oriented questions. What he did not ask him anything about was his position on presidential unilateralism--you know, whether it is legitimate to use the signing statement to get around the Congress? If he would have asked, he might have had an answer that not only interested his viewers but also set him apart from the other talk shows on Sunday.
Richardson, no doubt, would have told eight dwarf that there are times when politics gets in the way of Congress doing its duty to the American people, and when that happens, you simply have to dismiss whatever actions the Congress takes. And Richardson may have even given Stephanopoulos his support for the unitary executive theory of presidential power. How would I know such things?
If you remember back in 1999, the Clinton administration not only was dealing with impeachment and the Lewinsky controversy, but also a series of newspaper reports about employees at our nuclear labs stealing information and selling it to the Chinese. Clinton was forced to convene a task force, known as the Presidential Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board to "undertake a review of the security threat at the DOE's weapons labs and the adequacy of measures that have been taken" to reduce such a threat. When PFIAB concluded its work, it found that the problems were too numerous and recommended a complete reorganization at DOE in order to put in place an individual who would oversee "all nuclear weapons-related matters previously housed at DOE," and to insulate this person from political pressure. In layman's terms, the Republican-Congress wanted to place an executive branch officer who would not fall under the direction of the president--many of the same Republicans in the past year who stood up and matter of factly proclaimed a right of a president to hire and fire any executive branch officer (with Arlen Specter adding secret language to the Patriot Act reauthorization giving the president the power).
The administration battled a number of bills that sought to give the Congress more say in the way in which the president controlled inferior administration officials. Despite its best effort, the Republicans who controlled the Congress used the conference committee to bamboozle the administration. The conference committee is a closed committee that contains hand-picked members to work out the differences between House and Senate bills. In the conference for the "National Defense Authorization Act for FY 2000," however, the Republicans created the "National Nuclear Security Administration," whose director would enjoy semi-autonomy to care for "the safety, reliability, and effectiveness of the US nuclear weapons stockpile, nuclear non-proliferation, and naval nuclear reactors." In President Clinton's signing statement, he noted his displeasure for the sneaky way the Congress went about creating this new office in light of the repeated communications from the administration that it opposed it. Clinton argued that the new director, free from the president's direction, would "impair effective health and safety oversight and program direction of the Department's nuclear defense complex." So in response to the strategy the Congress deployed to get around the veto (placing this language in a necessary bill), he ordered the Secretary of Energy--Bill Richardson--to take on the duties of this new director until one could be appointed, at which time that person would fall under the president's direction.
The Republicans in Congress were furious that Clinton put his own crony in a position that was meant to be free from political pressure and then claimed that once appointed, the director would not enjoy the autonomy they envisioned. So Congress did what it failed to do the first five years of the Bush administration--it called in a member of the President's Cabinet for tough questioning. The Congress called in Richardson to explain why he--and the president--were ignoring he law. Rather than showing contrition, Richardson told the House Armed Services Committee that he did not feel any obligation to follow the intent of the law because the version the administration supported was sunk in an underhanded way by the congressional Republicans and this new agency, which the administration vociferously opposed, was added in secret in order to embarrass the administration. When Richardson was shown testimony given by the General Accounting Office (now the Government Accountability Office, or GAO) and the Congressional Research Service that the action by the administration undermined our national security, Richardson responded with: "I have yet to find the GAO to say something positive about anything."
The administration did appoint a new director in the spring of 2000, but by this time the Congress had passed additional legislation specifying the responsibilities of the new office and outlining the circumstances of removal, which would be for "inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office." President Clinton qualified this language in a signing statement by defining "neglect of duty" to mean "a failure to comply with the lawful directives of policies of the President." Days later Congress sent another bill to the president, with a provision meant to respond to his signing statement, by stating: "The exclusive reasons for removal from office as Under Secretary for Nuclear Security of the [new director] shall be inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office." Not to be outdone, Clinton again qualified in his signing statement that he understood "neglect of duty" to "include, among other things, a failure to comply with the lawful directives or policies of the President." And so it stood. Clinton never acquiesced, though his time in office quickly ran out.
The bigger part of this story is the role Richardson played in defending a strategy ripped right out of the unitary executive playbook. And the fact that it was a strategy advanced by Democrats, and not Republicans. Here was a great chance to ask a presidential candidate a question that gets at the heart of presidential power in the 21st century, and Stephanopoulos chose to let it slide in the interest of letting Richardson know that he is not a credible candidate.
