[Dialogue] The Imperial Presidency at Work

[Harry Wainwright]

 <http://www.nytimes.com/> The New York Times <http://www.nytimes.com/> 



 

January 15, 2006

Editorial

The Imperial Presidency at Work 

You would think that Senators Carl Levin and John McCain would have learned
by now that you cannot deal in good faith with a White House that does not
act in good faith. Yet both men struck bargains intended to restore the rule
of law to American prison camps. And President Bush tossed them aside at the
first opportunity.

Mr. Bush made a grand show of inviting Mr. McCain into the Oval Office last
month to announce his support for a bill to require humane treatment of
detainees at Guantánamo Bay and other prisons run by the American military
and intelligence agencies. He seemed to have managed to get Vice President
Dick Cheney to stop trying to kill the proposed Congressional ban on torture
of prisoners.

The White House also endorsed a bargain between Mr. Levin and Senator
Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, which tempered somewhat a noxious proposal
by Mr. Graham to deny a court hearing to anyone the president declares to be
an "unlawful enemy combatant." The bargain with Mr. Levin removed language
that stripped away cases already before the courts, which would have been an
egregious usurpation of power by one branch of government, and it made clear
that those cases should remain in the courts.

Mr. Bush, however, seems to see no limit to his imperial presidency. First,
he issued a constitutionally ludicrous "signing statement" on the McCain
bill. The message: Whatever Congress intended the law to say, he intended to
ignore it on the pretext the commander in chief is above the law. That
twisted reasoning is what led to the legalized torture policies, not to
mention the domestic spying program.

Then Mr. Bush went after the judiciary, scrapping the Levin-Graham bargain.
The solicitor general informed the Supreme Court last week that it no longer
had jurisdiction over detainee cases. It said the court should drop an
existing case in which a Yemeni national is challenging the military
tribunals invented by Mr. Bush's morally challenged lawyers after 9/11. The
administration is seeking to eliminate all other lawsuits filed by some of
the approximately 500 men at Gitmo, the vast majority of whom have not been
shown to pose any threat.

Both of the offensive theories at work here - that a president's intent in
signing a bill trumps the intent of Congress in writing it, and that a
president can claim power without restriction or supervision by the courts
or Congress - are pet theories of Judge Samuel Alito, the man Mr. Bush chose
to tilt the Supreme Court to the right.

The administration's behavior shows how high and immediate the stakes are in
the Alito nomination, and how urgent it is for Congress to curtail Mr.
Bush's expansion of power. Nothing in the national consensus to combat
terrorism after 9/11 envisioned the unilateral rewriting of more than 200
years of tradition and law by one president embarked on an ideological
crusade.

 

*	Copyright
<http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html>  2006The New
York Times Company <http://www.nytco.com/> 

 

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