An open letter to Barack Obama

President-elect Obama:

I'm glad to be one of many, many people who congratulate your historic win. I was not one of your original supporters, but I have been impressed with the way you conducted yourself, your campaign, and with the way your empowerment philosophy has trickled all the way down to the volunteers on the street. Truly, you have been a uniter.

The office you will be holding has changed dramatically since its inception, and greatly even in my own memory. George Bush has changed it almost beyond recognition. I think that one of the reasons that people have become so divided over politics and the presidency is because the position has become so powerful, and so people are desperate to get "their guy" in.

Most of this power has come from the abuse of the Executive Order. John Quincy Adams issued a grand total of two Executive Orders, one lamenting the passing of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, and the other lamenting the passing of Major-General Jacob Brown.

The last numbered EO (as of October 9th) is 13476.

I first became aware of the extent of this power in 2001, as President Bush started unraveling the good things that President Clinton had done when he was in the White House. What astonished me was not the unraveling, but the fact that this good had been accomplished by Executive Order and not by working with the Congress.

This cannot continue. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. The Executive Order can be used to good ends, but when it becomes a way to bypass Congress routinely, and to cut the people's representatives out of the governing process, it becomes a trap, a drug, a temptation to increase itself for the sake of gathering more and more power to the executive.

I understand that on Day One, there are many wrongs that could be put right, just by reversing Bush's reversals of Clinton's reversals of Bush and Reagan. Then what? It may be politically difficult, but perhaps the best move in this game is simply not to play. Work it the way you're supposed to, with the Congress.

Even more odious are the Signing Statements, and the way they have been transformed and deformed by President Bush. He refused to play by the Constitutional rules and veto bills he didn't like, opting instead to simply ignore the law of the land. You know as well as I that that is not the Rule of Law, it is the Law of Rule.

In his book "A World Waiting to be Born", M. Scott Peck observed that the only legitimate reason to gather power is to give it away, to share, to empower. This is what I watched you do with your people over the last two years. Please continue this work.

Respectfully yours.