®

                      Be a Mullings Subscriber! Click here.

Speech & Debate Clause

Monday, August 5, 2002

---

A MULLINGS EXCLUSIVE! The Transcript of the Clinton interview with an Israeli Recruiting Sergeant!
Right HERE!

---

• TITLE: "Speech & Debate Clause"

• " � Earlier this year �" This "joint" committee has not been a glorious example of the Congress' ability to investigate anything. In addition to the leak, and several fits and starts, the guy who was hired to lead the staff, quit at the end of April over what were termed "personnel matters."

  Nevertheless, here is a pretty good overview into what the investigating committee is supposed to do.

• " � Senator Dan Quayle �" Quayle was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1980, and re-elected in 1986. In 1980 he knocked off an 18-year incumbent, Birch Bayh. Prior to his election to the Senate, Quayle had been a Representative. He had been elected to the House by knocking off and 18-year incumbent as well.

  Later events have overshadowed the fact that Quayle was an excellent politician and a respected member of the Senate.

• " � Department of Energy �" The Department of Energy controls nuclear weapons and the national laboratories - Fermi, Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos, etc. The Department of Defense has responsibility (under direct authority from the President) for actually deploying the weapons.

• " � separation of powers �" From the Grolier's Encyclopedia Americana:

  Classical political philosophers from Aristotle onward favored a "mixed" government combining the elements of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. The English theorist James Harrington in his Oceana (1656) derived a theory akin to separation of powers from the old idea of mixed government. Later, John Locke, in his second treatise Of Civil Government (1690), urged that the best way to avoid a perverted government was to provide constitutionally for separation of the legislative and executive powers. Montesquieu, in his Spirit of the Laws (1748), added the third power of the judiciary to this concept, and the modern expression of separation of powers came into being. The mechanics of checks and balances were refined by the founders of the American republic.

  
  
  
      World War I Poster

  
  

•     Mullings' Catchy Caption of the Day:
  

  
  Somewhere kid's parents sit,
  thinking about the good money
  they spent,
  sending him to college.

  (AP Photo/David Cheskin) ____________________________________________________________________________________