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July 6, 2006
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July 6, 2006 |
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EDITORIAL Checking an imbalance of power It would be alarming in any week to read “The Hidden Power,” the July 3 New Yorker article written by Washington correspondent Jane Mayer. But it was especially unsettling to read the article in this Fourth of July week, a time when, after the parades have petered out and the fireworks fizzled to the ground, we are left to ponder the state of the 230-year-old experiment in democracy called the United States of America. According to Mayer, things aren’t looking so good. Especially, they’re not looking good in regard to that basic American principle of the balance of power. Her article spotlights David Addington, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff and longtime legal advisor. While unknown to most people outside government, Addington is now recognized as the principal legal architect of the New Paradigm, the Bush administration’s term for its expanding the power of the presidency and diminishing the power of Congress. According to Mayer, the New Paradigm “rests on a reading of the Constitution that few legal scholars share--namely, that the President, as Commander-in-Chief, has the authority to disregard virtually all previously known legal boundaries, if national security demands it.” Begun in response to 9/11 and the administration’s stated desire to quickly bring terrorists to justice, the New Paradigm as a first step established “military commissions” to try the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, creating a process which was actually unaccountable to either civil or military justice systems. Addington, Cheney et al went on to condone the use of torture, and then to the unauthorized surveillance of United States citizens. And while these measures were created in the name of fighting terrorism, many sources in the Mayer article assert that Cheney and Addington have sought to expand presidential power for decades. According to the article, Addington has also been behind the Bush administration’s use of “signing statements,” a heretofore little-used process which allows the president to simply add a statement to laws passed by Congress saying, essentially, that he will follow the law if he chooses to. While presidents in the past have used signing statements in exceptional circumstances, Bush has appended the statements to laws an unprecedented 750 times. During this same period, he has never vetoed any laws, so that rather than engage with Congress and the American people in debate over a law’s validity, he simply ignores the law and states that he can do as he wants. In her article, Mayer cites voices of concern over Bush’s expanded powers from a variety of sources, many of them conservative Republicans. Bruce Fein, a legal activist and associate deputy attorney general in the Reagan White House who twice voted for Bush, described the Bush administration as having “staked out powers that are a universe beyond any other Administration. This President has made claims that are really quite alarming.” It’s not news that the Bush administration has sought to expand presidential power. But most troubling, to me, was learning how secretly that expansion took place, how few people were involved and how little or no debate took place over this huge shift in the balance of power. That debate is now finally beginning, with last week’s Supreme Court ruling that even in wartime, the president does not have unlimited powers. And last month the American Bar Association voted to investigate the legitimacy of Bush’s use of signing statements. These are hopeful developments. Even more hopeful would be signs that the American people have had enough of this overreaching for power. The Fourth of July fireworks are beautiful, but they commemorate very real battles, very real struggles that led to the birth of this country. It’s clear that the struggle goes on, that our democracy is as strong as we make it, as vigorous as our own voices raised in protest and debate.
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