Ever Expanding Executive Power

The Sunday New York Times Magazine ran a very in-depth piece on the Senate, the imperial presidency and its future. Of note, the piece says:

The assertion and expansion of presidential power is arguably the defining feature of the Bush years. Come January, the current administration will pass on to its successor a vast infrastructure for electronic surveillance, secret sites for detention and interrogation and a sheaf of legal opinions empowering the executive to do whatever he feels necessary to protect the country. The new administration will also be the beneficiary of Congress’s recent history of complacency, which amounts to a tacit acceptance of the Bush administration’s expansive views of executive authority. For that matter, thanks to the recent economic bailout, Bush’s successor will inherit control over much of the banking industry. “The next president will enter office as the most powerful president who has ever sat in the White House,” Jack Balkin, a constitutional law professor at Yale and an influential legal blogger, told me a few weeks ago. [Ialics mine – CHF]

. . .

Bruce Fein, a Justice Department lawyer in the Reagan administration who is now a critic of presidential power, told me a few weeks ago that he expects the next president to “take everything Bush has given him and wield it with even greater confidence because Congress has given him a safe harbor to do so with impunity.” This may be overstating the point, but it’s worth keeping in mind that in the final year of Bush’s presidency — while facing a Democratic Congress and historically low approval ratings — he was able to push through a federal bailout bill that vested almost complete control over the economy in the Treasury secretary (who reports to the president), not to mention a major rewriting of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that will make it easier for the White House to spy on American citizens.

At the president’s urging, the new FISA bill, which Obama and McCain supported, also went a step further, granting immunity to telecom companies that cooperated with the government’s secret surveillance program. As a result, we will probably never know how many people were spied on, what criteria were used to select them and what was done with the information gleaned from the wiretaps.

. . .

For all of the legislature’s complaints about being excluded from the political process during the Bush years, it seems fair to question whether Congress really wants to be a full partner in America’s government. Senators may not like being kept in the dark, but they seem to prefer to leave the big decisions — especially those concerning national security — to the executive. “There’s a psychology of vassalage to the president,” Fein says. “They don’t want to be out there on a limb.”

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7:44 pm on November 9, 2008