April 1, 2006
by Gene Healy
CATO
INSTITUTE“Trust the president.” That was the Bush administration’s main defense of the president’s bizarre choice of corporate lawyer Harriet Miers for a seat on the Supreme Court. But the administration also had a backup rationale: as D.C.’s Hill newspaper reported, in an October 3, 2005, conference call with conservative leaders, Republican National Committee chair Ken Mehlman stressed “the need to confirm a justice who will not interfere with the administration’s management of the war on terrorism.”
It was a bit unsettling to hear that proposition stated so baldly, but no one who has followed the administration’s drive to expand executive power could have been altogether surprised that leaving that power unchecked was a key goal for the Bush team. Since the start of the war on terror, the Bush administration has singlemindedly advanced the view that, in time of war, the president is the law, and no statute, no constitutional barrier, no coordinate branch of the U.S. government can stand in the president’s way when, by his lights, he is acting to preserve national security. Bush administration officials have argued
that the president has the inherent constitutional authority to designate American citizens suspected of terrorist activity as “enemy combatants,” strip them of any constitutional protection, and hold them for the duration of the war on terror;
that the president has the power to ignore validly enacted statutes prohibiting war crimes if he believes those statutes impede his prosecution of the war on terror; and
? that the president has the power to launch invasions of other countries at his discretion, without so much as a by-yourleave to Congress.
In a 1977 interview with David Frost, Richard Nixon described his view of the president’s national security authority: “Well, when the President does it, that means it is not illegal.” In the arguments it has advanced, both publicly and privately, for untrammeled executive power, the Bush administration comes perilously close to that view.
A Presidential Power to Imprison?
In recent months the executive power issue has come to the fore with the revelation that the Bush administration has repeatedly bypassed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act by conducting warrantless surveillance of Americans. President Bush has asserted that he has inherent authority as commander in chief to ignore the statutory framework set up by Congress. Judging by the polls and the press, many Americans find that line of argument alarming.
It’s unclear why it was domestic surveillance that finally drew public attention to the administration’s proclivity for evading the law in the name of national security. The claims the administration has made in the FISA debate are consistent with the view of executive authority that they’ve pressed since 9/11. Nowhere is that clearer than in the case of José Padilla, perhaps the starkest example of the administration’s drive for unchecked presidential power. Padilla, a Brooklyn-born American citizen, was arrested by federal agents at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport in May 2002 and held on a material witness warrant. Two days before a hearing in federal court on the validity of that warrant, the president declared Padilla an “enemy combatant” plotting a “dirty bomb” attack in the United States and ordered him transferred to a naval brig in South Carolina, hundreds of miles away from his lawyer. Padilla was held there for three and a half years without being charged, until his recent transfer to federal prison. …
Rice: People will soon thank Bush for what he’s done
December 28, 2008
CNNPolitics.com
“This isn’t a popularity contest. I’m sorry, it isn’t. What the administration is responsible to do is to make good choices about Americans’ interests and values in the long run — not for today’s headlines, but for history’s judgment,” she said. …
http://edition.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/12/28/rice.administration/?iref=mpstoryview
The Rice quote kinda reminds me of a TV ad I once saw – long ago. Two senior citizens, a mother and father, were rocking in their rocking chairs on their front porch. As I remember it their son, a well know baseball player, was known by practically everybody as being rather “mischievous” as a baseball player. He kicked dirt on more than one umpire, more than one time.
The mother was voicing her memory of their son – the baseball player. She went on to say, “he was a fine boy”. And the father, after a few moments of reflection, reminded the audience that “mother’s memory is not as good as it used to be”.
Ex-Secretary of State Rice, may not remember Mr. George W. Bush’s administration the same way that some of the rest of us do. And that is an acceptable idea, opinion or state.
[SIDEBAR? While the world has to be aware of how much the neocons wanted Mr. George W. Bush to have expanded powers, would the neocons feel that way today? An advantage that “functional opportunists” have is their CORE values are hard to pin-down. They may not want expanded power for America’s President – unless that President is a neocon.]
