Good point. “Czar” is being used as a term of derision, and the comparison is not an inappropriate one, despite what many on this board want to believe.
I’m pretty sure they’re not in the minority. Only a very small number of top officials within the Executive Office of the President (that includes all the “czars”) require Senate confirmation. Some current examples of czars that don’t require confirmation are:
AIDS Czar (Director of the Office of National AIDS policy; ranked as a second-level advisor in the EOP.)
Bioethics Czar (Chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics)
Faith Czar, who ran President Bush’s Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives
Urban Czar (Director of Office of Urban Affairs Policy; a senior advisor within the EOP)
And so on and so forth. There are literally hundreds of these, many of which only existed for a year or two. Many of them are existing cabinet officials who are charged with extra advisory duties by the president. But most are ad-hoc offices created within the EOP under the president’s discretionary power to run his own office with minimal interference.
The EOP’s purpose is to formulate policy and advise the president, but the operative functions of the executive branch all fall under the cabinet departments and their Senate-approved secretaries, under-secretaries, and deputy and assistant secretaries.
It’s one thing to criticize the other party’s appointments on their merits; after all, we can’t all be like Brownie and do a heckuva job, but…
The OP and the question is - does appointing a “czar” violate the constitutional prohibition on noble titles?
Who honestly believes it does and says so publicly?
Who dishonestly believes/claims it does, and why would they say so if they don’t really believe?
So far, I see:
No
Nobody
O’Donell for one, probably to come up with any lame excuse to criticize the administration.
To quote a great man about pigs and lipstick, “enough with the phony outrage.”
(I’ve never had much respect for the rhetorical device of pseudo-naivete, but, on the off-chance you really don’t know, here is a good place to learn more.)
To the OP: I first heard your argument from Craig Anthony Miller, the guy who confronted Arlen Specter at a town hall meeting about health care.
Do you really think that the use of the word ‘czar’ by the media violates the constitution? If the czars had the same powers, but were referred to by reporters as, I dunno, “Boss Man”, would the constitution be intact? (And I’m sure you and Mr. Miller expressed the same objections when George H. W. Bush appointed William Bennett ‘drug czar’?)
It was an attempt at a joke. Since Ruth came up as an example of someone with an unofficial title, I thought I’d play on “Babe” being an unofficial name.
I’d like to see a cite for that. Just the part about Afghanistan. Plenty of people opposed the war in Iraq, including our current elected president, so I don’t see that as particularly controversial.
But that wasn’t the complaint. The complaint was only about the title “Czar” and whether it was legal to give such a title.
Um maybe you should re-read. The silliness relates to the Tea Partier complaining about Obama admin. czars, while staying mum about Bush admin. czars. I call that a double standard, or dishonesty.
And taking a nickname like “Czar” as literal bestowment of a title of nobility which was the official Tea Party complaint - well how else do you call that besides silly?
Again, if they want to criticze the appointment of certain indiviuals based on their past records, or that general advisors which are nicknamed Czars have too much influence and too little oversight - then they should’ve made that argument. They didn’t.
Um, the nickname Czar was not created by Tea Partiers (because it was used by Bush before); the problem is that criticsm of a nickname is silly, esp. if other critiscm would be more valid; and the next admin.s advisors will likely be called czars again unless they are called in a different procedure, given different powers etc.
The terms to describe individual person depends on what those persons did, and thus varies.
Given that all those “actions” or rather wars stirred up resentment against the US in the Arab world, and that many people saw terrorist acts against US soldiers as only method to get foreign occupiers off their territory, this sounds rather sensible.
Do you think a Terrorism czar, or expert, who’s gung-ho on shooting everybody suspected terrorist and torturing the rest will make better progress than one who faces reality and thinks about consequences, who knows that you don’t use soldiers to fight terrorists?
I don’t think we need to get into a partisan political discussion here regarding the merits of Obama’s appointments, from either side.
Since the factual aspects of the OP have been answered - that the appointment of a so-called “czar” does not violate the Constitution in any way - I’m going to close this. Those who wish to discuss the political reasons for making this argument may take it up in a new thread in Great Debates.