Something of a meme going around:
By some bizarre set of circumstances, you are the president as of now. Name the first 5 things you’d do. Level of difficulty: it must actually be stuff the president is constitutionally allowed to do.
Say Uncle has his answers here [lots o comments], Eric Grumbles his answers here, Dangerous Liberty here, Rhymes with Right here.
Assuming these are within my power [I am not a lawyer]:
1) As Eric puts it in the comments, with regard to Don't Ask, Don't Tell, "You can ... direct your DoD leadership not to pursue such cases." Works for me.
2) Ending the War on Drugs seems very popular. Works for me also. You can't make smoking marijuana legal, but if everyone convicted of possession of small amounts of marijuana automatically gets a presidential pardon, I suspect things will change.
3) Stop the FDA's mission creep. They will only certify that a substance is relatively safe in humans [ie, current stage one trials].
4) Stolen from Eric: require all departments of the executive branch to immediately reduce staff by 10%, based on performance. Oh yeah.
5) Hirings and firings: I have several extremely intelligent friends, who have nothing to do with politics on the grand scale. I suspect they would be much better than lifelong politicians. JohnL for Supreme Court Justice.
I wouldn't automatically veto everything, you'd only piss off Congress, who could probably get the votes together to override. On the other hand, I wouldn't pull a W and never veto anything.
Posted by Owlish at August 21, 2005 10:48 PM | TrackBackOh boy. I'm going to have to tackle this meme tonight.
I think the Supreme Court would be a real sweet gig. I would love to be nominated (even though there's no chance of confirmation) just to tell the "honorable" Senators where to stick their stupid questions during the confirmation hearings. Now if they asked intelligent, non-self-serving questions, I would show them a reciprocal amount of respect and deference and answer honestly and completely. Yet another reason I would never be confirmed.
I agree, JohnL -- I think I'd be showing them my rear repeatedly (and I don't mean that figuratively) at a confirmation hearing (right here, Senator, right here!)
Posted by: Ogre at August 22, 2005 11:53 AM