[Peace-discuss] Commentaries on the imperial presidency.

[Morton K. Brussel]

Entries taken from burbules at gmail.com, to which you can subscribe.


http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2005/12/sos.html
[Katherine] We have a President here who is making a claim of  
unlimited power, for the duration of a war that may never end.  Oh,  
he says it's limited by the country's laws, but they've got a crack  
legal team that reliably interprets the laws to say that the  
President gets to do whatever he wants. It amounts to the same  
thing. . .

September 11 started the war. When will it end? Maybe never. Where is  
the battlefield? The entire world, including the United States. Who  
is an enemy combatant?  Anyone the President says is an enemy  
combatant, including a U.S. citizen--no need for a charge, no need  
for a trial, no need for access to a lawyer. What if they're found  
not to be an enemy combatant? We can keep them in prison anyway, and  
we don't have to tell their families they're alive or their lawyers  
that they were cleared.  What can you do to an enemy combatant?   
Anything you want. Detain him forever, for the rest of his life,  
because this is a war like any other and we have always been able to  
detain POWs for the duration of the war. But you don't need to follow  
the Geneva Conventions, because this is a war like no other in our  
history. And oh yes--if the President decides that we need to torture  
a prisoner for the war effort, it's unconstitutional for Congress to  
stop him. They took that position in an official memo, and they have  
not backed down from it. They have said it was "unnecessary" but they  
have never backed down from it.

They are not only entitled to do these things to people; they are  
entitled to do them in secret.  When Congress asks for information  
about them, they can just ignore it. And they are entitled to  
actively deceive the public about all this. . . That's the power they  
claim.

http://blogs.salon.com/0000014/2005/12/20.html#a957
[Scott Rosenberg] In order to understand the nature of the strange  
constitutional crisis President Bush has dragged the country into  
through his bizarre extralegal domestic surveillance program, you  
have to dig into the vaults of your brain's American history  
storehouse and drag out the word "nullification." The doctrine of  
nullification, a legal concept that enjoyed a brief moment in the sun  
in the antebellum South, held that individual states had the power to  
disregard, or "nullify," federal laws that they didn't like. . .

Today, the Bush administration has been steered into dangerous waters  
by veterans of the Nixon/Ford era, like Dick Cheney and Donald  
Rumsfeld, who have pursued a decades-long quest to reassert the  
glories of the imperial presidency they cherished as young men and  
then saw shamed and dismantled in the aftermath of Watergate. Most  
Americans at the time concluded from that scandal of executive  
privilege that absolute power corrupts absolutely; Cheney and  
Rumsfeld believed instead that Watergate had crippled and emasculated  
the presidency. 9/11 gave them an opportunity to bring back the good  
old days of enemies' lists, intelligence-doctoring and (now we know)  
domestic surveillance -- and even to extend the tradition of the  
imperial presidency into hitherto unexplored regions of White House- 
sanctioned torture, indefinite imprisonment without trial, and war  
without end.

And so we find ourselves entering a period of conflict with peculiar  
overtones of that "nullification" period. Only now it's not the  
states attempting to usurp the federal authority; in the Bush version  
of nullification, it's the Executive Branch that has begun to claim  
for itself the arbitrary and absolute right to disregard the explicit  
will of the legislature -- not through the exercise of constitutional  
veto but through secrecy, legal chicanery and sheer chutzpah. . .

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