During the State of the Union, which I totally ignored until this morning, President Bush let loose a doozy full of piss and vinegar but nothing of useful substance. He was gonna get the earmarks and put a stop to them!
Bush says that any earmarks that aren't actually in the bill as opposed to a committee report referenced by the bill will be ignored by the administration unless the administration decides they like them. Here's the proposed Executive Order:
For appropriations laws and other legislation enacted after the date of this order, executive agencies should not commit, obligate, or expend funds on the basis of earmarks included in any non-statutory source, including requests in reports of committees of the Congress or other congressional documents, or communications from or on behalf of Members of Congress, or any other non-statutory source, except when required by law or when an agency has itself determined a project, program, activity, grant, or other transaction to have merit under statutory criteria or other merit-based decisionmaking.
Translation: if we like it, we'll do it. If not, we won't.
Fuck the Congressional power of the purse-strings, now George Bush is the final arbiter of all that is of value and what the government will fund.
It's simply an extension of his "signing statement" policy, where he decides that any portion of a bill he doesn't like will simply be ignored.
So now we have a President who denies the right of Congress to pass laws unless he approves, denies the right of Congress to hold oversight unless he approves, and denies the right of Congress to set the budget and spending priorities unless he approves.
As long as Congress itself gave up the power to declare war over the past 50 years, that pretty much leaves them with absolutely no power except to whine about steroid users in baseball and cheaters in football.
That leaves the Supreme Court as the only governmental body that still has any teeth, and these are the folks who put Bush in office in the first place and then got more Bush-friendly after the appointments of Alito and Roberts. So they're probably pretty much like the new Pakistani Supreme Court created by General Musharraf that had to take loyalty oaths to the dictator.
The lack of outrage in the populace, Court and Congress essentially puts us in a situation of having a King who cannot be stopped by either legislative or judicial powers.
All hail King George.