McCain Doesn’t Understand Presidential Powers
John McCain evidently thinks the Presidency would allow him to fire any person he wants. Evidently he needs to be schooled on that, else we risk him charging into the Supreme Court yelling “Off with their heads!” In this latest case, he doesn’t understand the President doesn’t have the power to fire the Chair of the SEC.
First, we just saw that Sarah Palin’s knowledge of the state of government in Washington didn’t extend very far. She’s proposing a measure already placed into law by Barack Obama two years ago. Now we get to see that John McCain doesn’t even know what his powers as President are. In response to the crisis on Wall Street, John McCain said he would fire the head of the SEC, Christopher Cox, a lifelong Republican who once served in the House of Representatives from California. There’s one little hitch. While the President nominates the Chair of the SEC, he doesn’t fire him, as the SEC is an independent Commission. The constitution doesn’t allow him to do so. From ABCNews:
ABC News’ David Wright reports: At a joint rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Thursday, Republican John McCain slammed the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) for being “asleep,” saying that if he were president, he would fire Chris Cox, the chairman of the SEC since 2005 and a former Republican congressman.
McCain said the SEC has allowed trading practices, such as short selling, to stay in place, that turned the “markets into a casino.”
“The regulators were asleep, my friends,” McCain said. “The chairman of the SEC serves at the appointment of the president, and in my view, has betrayed the public trust. If I were president today, I would fire him.”
But while the president nominates and the Senate confirms the SEC chair, a commissioner of an independent regulatory commission cannot be removed by the president.
From time to time, presidents have attempted to remove commissioners who have proven “uncooperative.” However, the courts have generally upheld the independence of commissioners. In 1935, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt fired a member of the Federal Trade Commission, and the Supreme Court ruled the president acted unconstitutionally.
No, we should not elect a man who doesn’t even understand the power he weilds once he gets in the office. Nor should we elect someone with such little respect for his constitutional powers. But McCain’s a hothead, so he’s liable to say stuff like this a lot as he slips in the polls. That’s par for the course, not change we can believe in.
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