This will be my final post in this discussion, so let me once again offer my thanks to the participants, and to everyone who posted comments. One of my big complaints about the bulk of the columns and articles that have been written so far about the prospect of post-Bush commissions and investigations is that few of them have engaged with the subject on a practical level--much has been written about whether a so-called truth commission is the right or wrong thing to do, but very little about how it would actually happen. Anne, Daniel, Kate, Mickey, Scott and Suzanne have all addressed this subject substantively, and I think our collective disagreements over what a real reckoning with the Bush legacy should look like demonstrate what a thorny and complicated proposition this really is.

Regarding the limits of executive power, I believe Daniel is misinterpreting the point of my last post -- I'm not at all opposed to weakening the executive branch, and agree with the broader case he makes for doing so here. Rather, my argument is that an investigation or prosecution shouldn't come at the expense of the government's capacity to do its job. A functional executive and an imperial one are entirely different things--a point that the Bush administration made quite nicely through its bungled application of the powers it sought so insatiably.

One of the great ironies here is that in seeking to grant itself quasi-monarchical powers in the manner that it did, the Bush White House actually did a far greater disservice to strong-executive proponents than it did to those of us who would prefer a weaker one. If Bush and Cheney had asked Congress to ratify the radically expanded powers they sought after September 11 (powers that Cheney had believed for decades rightfully belonged to the White House), Congress probably would have done so in most cases; some members of the Republican leadership were practically begging to at the time, the Patriot Act passed the Senate with only one dissenting vote, and the Democratic-controlled House and Senate--including Barack Obama--were willing to basically legalize after the fact most of the administration's initially illegal wiretapping program (at least as it was amended in 2004) last year. If the Bush administration had gone this route, it would be much more difficult to undo what they did.

But instead, the White House tried to simply create an unfettered executive by example, by acting as if the restraints that were in place simply weren't there. They did this through excessive classification, through exploitation of legal and institutional loopholes, and through the acquiescence of a pliant Republican Congress. The result was an imperial presidency but a decidedly rickety one, based mostly on tenuous interpretations of the law that were shielded from scrutiny by gratuitous, self-interested secrecy. Undoing it should be well within the capabilities of Obama and the new Congress if they have the will to do it, and a will to try to figure out as fully as possible what exactly happened over the past eight years.