It's Good To Be King, Pt. II

Coming on the heels of a must-read Boston Globe article on the several hundred laws the President has declared he has the authority to break, the Cato Institute (a conservative/libertarian think-tank) has released a two dozen-plus page report entitled "Power Surge: The Constitutional Record of George W. Bush".

The introduction states-

Unfortunately, far from defending the Constitution, President Bush has repeatedly sought to strip out the limits the document places on federal power. In its official legal briefs and public actions, the Bush administration has advanced a view of federal power that is astonishingly broad, a view that includes

• a federal government empowered to regulate core political speech—and restrict it greatly when it counts the most: in the days before a federal election;
  
• a president who cannot be restrained, through validly enacted statutes, from pursuing any tactic he believes to be effective in the war on terror;
  
• a president who has the inherent constitutional authority to designate American citizens suspected of terrorist activity as "enemy combatants," strip them of any constitutional protection, and lock them up without charges for the duration of the war on terror— in other words, perhaps forever; and
  
• a federal government with the power to supervise virtually every aspect of American life, from kindergarten, to marriage, to the grave.

President Bush's constitutional vision is, in short, sharply at odds with the text, history, and structure of our Constitution, which authorizes a government of limited powers.

They're being far too polite.

In the name of defending democracy abroad, the President is making a mockery of ours here at home. Warrantless wiretapping of American citizens with the cooperation of major telecommunication companies, secret prisons in foreign countries, kidnapping and rendition, government-sanctioned torture, the intimidation of journalists and whistleblowers, launching a war under false pretenses, selectively leaking classified information in secret to reporters to repair that damage, spying on political activists, using signing statements to free himself from obligations to laws that he signs... These are all things that the United States of America apparently stands for now.

And the President orders it all by himself, with no oversight from Congress and the courts, regardless of what laws may exist prohibiting such things. The President has "run amok", as Glenn Greenwald notes in the title of his new book.

Someone needs to stand up to this... more than just the faux-outrage of 'mavericks' like Arlen Specter.

The Democrats have even managed to silence Russ Feingold and his censure resolution.

Jack Balkin at the Balkinization blog has a good take on Bush, concluding that-

Bush is not the first President to try this strategy, but he has taken it to new extremes, making it a regular part of his relationship to law, as Savage details in his article. Making this a regular and pervasive practice is constitutionally worrisome, because it allows the President to escape responsibility for enforcing laws that he himself signs into law based on what may be unreasonable claims about constitutionality which are devised primarily to increase his own power. It allows the President to gain many of the advantages of the veto without incurring the political disadvantages, and it allows him, by riddling bills with exceptions in how he will enforce them, to produce what is in effect legislation that Congress never passed. In this way, Bush does an end run around the logic of separation of powers, one of whose central purposes, it should be pointed out, is to restrain the arbitrary exercise of power.

Bush has already adopted President Nixon's view that if the President authorizes something, it isn't illegal, despite what the text of the law says. Now Bush has taken the converse position that if the President doesn't agree with legislation, even legislation that he signs, it isn't law. Together, these two attitudes are deeply corrosive of the Rule of Law and move us down the path to a dictatorial conception of Presidential power-- that is, the conception that the President on his own may dictate what is and what is not law, rather than the President merely being the person in constitutional system entrusted with faithful implementation and enforcement of the law.

And that's key. It's not just contained to the President personally; he's radically altering the way the system works.

Sen. Feingold, wherever you are, maybe it's time for round two.