Mr. Cheney's Imperial
Presidency
EDITORIAL, NYTimes on
the Web, December 23, 2005
George W. Bush has quipped several
times during his political career that it would be so much easier to govern in a
dictatorship. Apparently he never told his vice president that this was a
joke.
Virtually from the time he chose himself to be Mr. Bush's running mate in 2000,
Dick Cheney has spearheaded an extraordinary expansion of the powers of the
presidency -- from writing energy policy behind closed doors with oil executives
to abrogating longstanding treaties and using the 9/11 attacks as a pretext to
invade Iraq, scrap the Geneva Conventions and spy on American citizens.
It was a chance Mr. Cheney seems to have been dreaming about for decades.
Most Americans looked at wrenching events like the Vietnam War, the Watergate
scandal and the Iran-contra debacle and worried that the presidency had become
too powerful, secretive and dismissive. Mr. Cheney looked at the same
events and fretted that the presidency was not powerful enough, and too
vulnerable to inspection and calls for accountability.
The president "needs to have his constitutional powers unimpaired, if you will,
in terms of the conduct of national security policy," Mr. Cheney said this week
as he tried to stifle the outcry over a domestic spying program that Mr. Bush
authorized after the 9/11 attacks.
Before 9/11, Mr. Cheney was trying to undermine the institutional and legal
structure of multilateral foreign policy: he championed the abrogation of
the Antiballistic Missile Treaty with Moscow in order to build an antimissile
shield that doesn't work but makes military contactors rich. Early in his
tenure, Mr. Cheney, who quit as chief executive of Halliburton to run with Mr.
Bush in 2000, gathered his energy industry cronies at secret meetings in
Washington to rewrite energy policy to their specifications. Mr. Cheney
offered the usual excuses about the need to get candid advice on important
matters, and the courts, sadly, bought it. But the task force was not an
exercise in diverse views. Mr. Cheney gathered people who agreed with him,
and allowed them to write national policy for an industry in which he had
recently amassed a fortune.
The effort to expand presidential power accelerated after 9/11, taking advantage
of a national consensus that the president should have additional powers to use
judiciously against terrorists.
Mr. Cheney started agitating for an attack on Iraq immediately, pushing the
intelligence community to come up with evidence about a link between Iraq and Al
Qaeda that never existed. His team was central to writing the legal briefs
justifying the abuse and torture of prisoners, the idea that the president can
designate people to be "unlawful enemy combatants" and detain them indefinitely,
and a secret program allowing the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on
American citizens without warrants. And when Senator John McCain
introduced a measure to reinstate the rule of law at American military prisons,
Mr. Cheney not only led the effort to stop the amendment, but also tried to
revise it to actually legalize torture at C.I.A. prisons.
There are finally signs that the democratic system is trying to rein in the
imperial presidency. Republicans in the Senate and House forced Mr. Bush
to back the McCain amendment, and Mr. Cheney's plan to legalize torture by
intelligence agents was rebuffed. Congress also agreed to extend the
Patriot Act for five weeks rather than doing the administration's bidding and
rushing to make it permanent.
On Wednesday, a federal appeals court refused to allow the administration to
transfer Jose Padilla, an American citizen who has been held by the military for
more than three years on suspicion of plotting terrorist attacks, from military
to civilian custody. After winning the same court's approval in September
to hold Mr. Padilla as an unlawful combatant, the administration abruptly
reversed course in November and charged him with civil crimes unrelated to his
arrest. That decision was an obvious attempt to avoid having the Supreme
Court review the legality of the detention powers that Mr. Bush gave himself,
and the appeals judges refused to go along.
Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney have insisted that the secret eavesdropping program is
legal, but The Washington Post reported yesterday that the court created to
supervise this sort of activity is not so sure. It said the presiding
judge was arranging a classified briefing for her fellow judges and that several
judges on the court wanted to know why the administration believed eavesdropping
on American citizens without warrants was legal when the law specifically
requires such warrants.
Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney are tenacious. They still control both houses of
Congress and are determined to pack the judiciary with like-minded ideologues.
Still, the recent developments are encouraging, especially since the court
ruling on Mr. Padilla was written by a staunch conservative considered by
President Bush for the Supreme Court.
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