Takeover

A peculiar quirk of having grown up overseas and gone to international schools was not taking any U.S. history or civics classes until late in my high school career. The whole thing hit me like a ton of bricks. I was enchanted with the Bill of Rights, the separation of powers between the three branches of the federal government, and the sheer boldness of the Declaration of Independence. I never really got over it, and continue to be unable to indulge the sort of cynicism which passes for political common sense these days. I actually really, really believe the self-evident fact that all men are created equal and that the government should make no law restricting free speech, and that government agencies keeping secrets from the people and their elected representatives is a tremendously bad idea.

That all being the case, I tend to spend most election cycles (which apparently is ALL THE TIME these days) muttering about how I'd be glad to vote for any candidate who makes restoring the Republic the main plank of his platform. In the past I was being, at least a bit, hyperbolic, but now I'm sure the Republic is long, long gone. In Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy, Charlie Savage documents how the Bush/Cheney administration took every single opportunity to expand executive power on the basis of contrived legal theories with no grounding in the Constitution's text or jurisprudential precedent. The imperial presidency, as Savage notes, was evolving for most of the twentieth century, but the last administration consolidated the movement and institutionalized its most egregious forms.

We have come to the point that most Americans honestly expect the president to exercise absolute, unchecked power: remember how Fred Thompson (who, I can't believe it, was actually a U.S. Senator) during his brief presidential campaign said that, were he elected, he would personally suspend all imports from China until their safety could be verified. And as Savage also notes, the imperial presidency is not a liberal or conservative phenomenon; presidents of all political stripes like being able to impose their will, unchecked by those other two branches of the federal government.

As Nat Hentoff, hero of the Republic, is recording (http://www.cato.org/people/nat-hentoff), Dear Leader offers no hope for those of us looking for the restoration of the rule of law. A liberal emperor is an emperor still.