BUSH IS FORCING A CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS

Two bigtime newspaper editorial boards today are going after the White House's steady journey toward absolute power.

From the New York Times courtesy of Eschaton:

The Real Agenda

It is only now, nearly five years after Sept. 11, that the full picture of the Bush administration’s response to the terror attacks is becoming clear. Much of it, we can see now, had far less to do with fighting Osama bin Laden than with expanding presidential power.

Over and over again, the same pattern emerges: Given a choice between following the rules or carving out some unprecedented executive power, the White House always shrugged off the legal constraints. Even when the only challenge was to get required approval from an ever-cooperative Congress, the president and his staff preferred to go it alone. While no one questions the determination of the White House to fight terrorism, the methods this administration has used to do it have been shaped by another, perverse determination: never to consult, never to ask and always to fight against any constraint on the executive branch.

Click here for more.

The editorial goes on to spell out a couple of examples of White House overreach, Guantanamo and illegal wiretapping, but their colleagues on the West Coast get much more specific about what's going on.

From the LA Times courtesy of BuzzFlash:

Bush: Worse Than Nixon

Among the many such activities are the seizure of U.S. citizens and their indefinite detention without charge or access to lawyers; warrantless wiretaps of citizens in violation of procedures mandated by Congress; and the seizing of individuals in foreign countries and their movement to third countries, where they have been subjected to torture in violation of U.S. laws and treaty obligations.

When these activities have leaked out, the president has not sought to deny them but has publicly defended them (and attacked the press for printing the information). The administration has vigorously opposed all efforts to have the courts review its actions, and when the Supreme Court has overruled the president, as it has several times now, the administration has given the court holdings the narrowest possible interpretation.

Congress has been treated with equal disdain. When the Senate voted overwhelmingly to prohibit torture and cruel and degrading treatment by all agencies, including the CIA, Vice President Dick Cheney warned lawmakers that they were overstepping their bounds and threatening national security. When Congress persisted and attached the language to a defense appropriations bill, the president signed the law with an accompanying statement declaring his right to disobey the anti-torture provisions.

The administration has repeatedly failed to inform Congress or its committees of what it was doing, or has told only a few selected members in a truncated way, preventing real oversight. Even leading Republicans, such as Michigan's Rep. Peter Hoekstra, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, have voiced strong concerns.

Click here for the rest.

So, the bottom line for both of these essays is that the accumulated effect of White House lawlessness is such that the very Constitutional structure of our government is in danger of becoming irrelevant. That is, Bush's actions are quite literally on the verge of dictatorship. It's very nice that these two corporate news outlets are at last recognizing the great peril in which we now find ourselves, but enlightened individuals were essentially saying the same thing within weeks of 9/11. I hope these loud establishment voices haven't joined the party too late to do any good--Bush has become so extraordinarily powerful that he may very well be able to follow through on his threat to prosecute newspapers for violating "national security laws;" indeed, these essays are no doubt in response to that threat.

I really like the LA Times' comparison with Nixon, who, like the Bush administration, was very successful with both bullying and covertly manipulating the press. I've been slowly working my way through what's been considered by some to be THE Watergate classic, Jonathan Schell's The Time of Illusion. It's been like deja vu. All of this has happened before. Virtually every bit of information coming to light about Bush is like it came out of Nixon's playbook: policy proposals designed to stir up political shit but not actually become law, unprecedented secrecy, consolidation and expansion of executive power justified by national security concerns, thousands of lies, and the smearing of political opponents on a mythic scale. And much, much more. It's a good comparison, but, really, the title says it all--"Worse Than Nixon." The Bush team has the benefit of both hindsight and an insanely loyal GOP dominated Congress. They're not repeating Tricky Dick's mistakes, and have the cover and legitimacy provided by the policy branch that Nixon didn't have.

Further, in the way that the Clinton impeachment was for many Republicans very much about avenging what happened to RMN, this White House power grab is about cleaning up what they believe is the mess Congress created in the wake of his resignation.

From the New Yorker:

THE HIDDEN POWER

In a revealing interview that Cheney gave last December to reporters traveling with him to Oman, he explained, “I do have the view that over the years there had been an erosion of Presidential power and authority. . . . A lot of the things around Watergate and Vietnam both, in the seventies, served to erode the authority I think the President needs.” Further, Cheney explained, it was his express aim to restore the balance of power. The President needed to be able to act as Alexander Hamilton had described it in the Federalist Papers, with “secrecy” and “dispatch”—especially, Cheney said, “in the day and age we live in . . . with the threats we face.” He added, “I believe in a strong, robust executive authority, and I think the world we live in demands it.”

Click here for the rest.

You know, I actually believe that these people really do think that they're trying to "restore the balance of power," which almost reaches the level of humorous irony because balance doesn't have a damned thing to do with what they want. But then, the conservatives, in their delusional state, have successfully rendered irony an obsolete concept. No, they want to unbalance the power shared by the three branches of the federal government such that the other two ultimately have no meaning or relevance. Do they have any idea that what they're trying to pull off would pretty much end the United States as we've always understood it? Probably not.

Another near irony: Cheney believes that "the day and age we live in" necessitates Mussolini-like White House power. He was, no doubt, invoking the conventional wisdom that 9/11 changed everything, which, for him, apparently means that there's no room for traditional American democracy anymore. Of course, that's total bullshit. 9/11 changed nothing, except for the emboldening of authoritarian strains within our own culture. Indeed, the exact opposite is true: in this day and age, with its high tech communications, weapons of mass destruction, high speed financial transactions, and a corporate press that is more concerned with sales and ratings than its role as "fourth branch" of government, investing a single individual with all of America's might is just too dangerous. Our founding fathers, recently under the yoke of King George III, understood well that monarchial power simply doesn't mix with liberty. Today, that danger is much greater than it was then. Today monarchial power destroys liberty.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$