Bill Moyers transcript

If you didn't watch Bill Moyers' program Friday night, you can still see it on-line or read the transcript.  One of the highlights was Mickey Edwards, a former congressman (R-Oklahoma) for sixteen years, who vigorously criticized Bush.  Calling himself a conservative, Mickey Edwards sounded very much like an outraged member of Daily Kos. Bush does not "get" what a president should do, he said, nor does he recognize his limited role as the head of merely one branch of the government.  Here is some of the transcript, slightly edited, of Edwards' discussion of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) with Moyers and Anthony Romero of the ACLU.

BILL MOYERS: Big government, big corporations, does that keep a conservative like you awake at night?
MICKEY EDWARDS: Oh, well, you know...all of the things that George Bush is doing and all of the things that conservatives in Congress have been supporting him on are things that conservatives like me fought against. That's why we became conservatives because we thought it was people like Tony who were going to do stuff like that. It turns out it's our people who are doing it.

Mickey Edwards deplored the new powers given to the executive branch in the recently revised FISA.

[The president] is not the head of government. He is head of one branch. He is not the head of the branch of government that has the power to declare war. He is not the head of the branch of government that has the power to take care of even decisions about what to do with prisoners of war. That in the constitution belongs to the Congress. You know, the Congress makes the laws. What we have here is a presidency that is seeking to change the entire system of government we have in order to accrue more power into the hands of the few individuals and say it's none of your business. Even though the Congress, the lawmaking branch, is supposed to represent the voice of the American people, we're not going to tell you anything. You create a new bill, you tell a federal agency to do this and file a report with the Congress, we're going to say we don't have to.

He differentiated between a strong president and a strong presidency, and spoke scathingly of Bush.

I agree we need a strong president. We need one who has a vision. We need one who thinks and acts decisively.  But we don't need a strong presidency. We need a presidency that operates within the constitution and within the separation of powers. The current president doesn't understand that. He thinks that here's a danger and I'm the boss and I'm the-- he has a greatly exaggerated view of what his authority is. And, therefore, he doesn't understand the steps that he's required to take. If he were a good president, he would say, "I'm going to marshal the public support. I'm going to go to the Congress. I'm going to make my case. We're going to have serious debates and discussions. And then together, you know, with the Congress taking the lead on the law, you know, we'll act." He doesn't-- he doesn't get that.

The congressman thinks "Al-Qaeda's threat is very, very real," but he opposes illegal methods in the effort to protect the country.

It's a matter of how it's done, whether you have to do it lawfully, whether you have to get a warrant.... What the president wants to do is cut Congress out of it, cut the courts out of it, get rid of the requirement in the Constitution to get a warrant.  I think there are too few people in Congress in either party who understand that the Congress is the equal branch...not just separate and independent but equal. And so when the president requires in his view these additional powers, that should be grounds for a very serious set of hearings, debate, serious discussion by the Congress....

He compared the present to an earlier time of danger.

I've got to say, just to put this into context, at the time this country was founded we faced a greater threat than al-Qaeda because, in fact, the British or the French had the power to wipe us out as a nation, not to kill a thousand people but to wipe us out as a nation. And even in the face of that, those people sat down, they wrote a constitution and said, "We know the dangers. We are not going to give the president, a president, the power to be the sole decider."....That's what's exceptional about America.