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GOING ALL BIPARTISAN. I've read much recently about the desirability for more comity and bipartisanship in Congress and also much about the impossibility of reaching across the aisle given the dearth of topics on which the two sides agree. Two topics suggest themselves to true bipartisan action.One is the question of limiting the enhanced presidential powers. Charlie Savage notes:
The expansive presidential powers claimed and exercised by the Bush-Cheney White House are now an immutable part of American history -- not controversies, but facts. The importance of such precedents is difficult to overstate. As Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson once warned, any new claim of executive power, once validated into precedent, "lies about like a loaded weapon ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need. Every repetition imbeds that principle more deeply in our law and thinking and expands it to new purposes."Even the conservatives should be concerned about this, because future presidents don't have to be Republicans.The second topic that should have bipartisan support is the push for more transparent elections. Astonishingly, neither of these seems to have garnered the bipartisan support they deserve.-- J. Goodrich
