Most of my favorite news sources (especially salon.com, Newsweek, and the Nation) carry items that ring in the New Year like a funeral dirge.
On salon, Sidney Blumenthal writes about the expansion of powers in the Bush presidency (call this article "Imperial Presidency #1"). He points out the familiar pattern of the administration in ignoring any input from federal agencies that doesn't support the predetermined conclusion. (Somewhat new to me were the repeated firings or career-ruining smearings of guys with "boots on the ground" in Baghdad, who dared to report that we hadn't been greeted with flowers.)
Truly scary, though: Bush adds his own caveats to congressional bills upon signing:
During his first term, President Bush issued an unprecedented 108 statements upon signing bills of legislation that expressed his own version of their content. He has countermanded the legislative history, which legally establishes the foundation of their meaning, by executive diktat. In particular, he has rejected parts of legislation that he considered stepped on his power in national security matters. In effect, Bush engages in presidential nullification of any law he sees fit. He then acts as if his gesture supersedes whatever Congress has done.Once my chin's off the floor, I can whisper: "So what is the meaning of 'rule of law,' anymore?"
Imperial Presidency #2 (also in salon) contains this nugget, which reminds me of some of my more paranoid late-night conversations ("What if Bush declared that it was unsafe to change presidents in 2008 and suspended the elections?"):
After all, if you can establish a presidential right to order torture (no matter how you manage to redefine it) as well as to hold captives under a category of warfare dredged up from the legal dustbin of history in prisons especially established to be beyond the reach of the law or the oversight of anyone but those under your command, you've established a presidential right to do just about anything imaginable.The imperial theme is echoed hesitantly in this week's issue of Newsweek, and in a more partisan piece on the Nation's website. The latter article argues that Bush needs to give up his imperialism or leave office, offering the following goad to those who lean Democratic (pun, if you call it that, intended):
The deeper challenge Bush has thrown down, therefore, is whether the country wants to embrace the new form of government he is creating by executive fiat or to continue with the old constitutional form. He is now in effect saying, "Yes, I am above the law--I am the law, which is nothing more than what I and my hired lawyers say it is--and if you don't like it, I dare you to do something about it."Now, this all seems quite separate from the issue of the Supreme Court (which, after all, connotes a separation of powers). But no. As Blumenthal points out in the first piece, above,
Not coincidentally, the legal author of this presidential strategy for accreting power was none other than the young Samuel Alito, in 1986 deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel. Alito's view on unfettered executive power, many close observers believe, was decisive in Bush's nomination of him to the Supreme Court.Strikes me that it's not Roe v Wade at stake in this nomination fight. It's constitutional democracy. Bush can recast laws as he signs them, can choose which ones to follow, can ignore those that are inconvenient. He can reject information from his own executive branch when it does not simply endorse his course of action. (Today, he can meet with a Who's Who of security advisers and blow them off as soon as he's pretended to listen.) He can act without regard to Congress. And with the right justices, he can do every bit of it with the blessing of the Supreme Court.
And I won't even go into the possibility that Bush et al. tapped the phones of the wife of a Kerry campaign operative, bringing the ghosts of Watergate screeching back in as literal a manifestation as you could want.
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On another note: the parallel headlines at CNN.com today. Ariel Sharon lies under sedation in Israel, unlikely to survive. A West Virginia miner lies in a coma in the US; no word on whether he'll recover. Two men suspended between living and dying. They could exchange places and recognize each other quite well. Their human experience at this moment is fundamentally equivalent. And yet the consequences for the world are so different, the meanings they represent more distant than the two locations, across the globe, where they sleep. Which is the larger meaning: the vigil around a hospital bed, the loved ones, the mechanical rise and fall of assisted lungs? Or the geopolitical stage, and the roles--one grand and crucial, one small like a speck of coal dust--that each has played?
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