Cheney's Project
I think Bush/Cheney, and an undetermined contingent of the Republican Party, have not necessarily lost anything by their time in the WH, despite that fact that Republican operatives outside this group have correctly noted that the Republican brand is "dog food" thanks to them.
In 2001, at the start of this nightmare, the Bush Administration earned the gratitude of Bill Clinton by putting the stopper on a Republican investigation of Janet Reno:
The first time Bush asserted executive privilege, in 2001, he inherited claims from the Clinton administration. Representative Dan Burton, Republican of Indiana, was demanding information from the Justice Department pertaining to the tenure of the former attorney general, Janet Reno, but the Bush administration refused, saying it would set a bad precedent. Burton backed down.
That was a very significant sign that the Administration's goals were something other than what many thought they were- that, in fact, there was less priority given to obsessional fantasies about the Clinton Administration that were so popular on the Right, and more priority to an abstract principle- that of expanding the power of the Executive, and undermining the possibility of Constitutional government in this country.
Sen. Arlen Specter actually asked Alberto Gonzales if Constitutional government was in fact being undermined, during one of their many confrontations. Naturally, he did not receive an intelligible answer, but asking the question itself was the important thing. It seems that Specter- along with Sens. Feinstein and Schumer- abandoned this line of inquiry when Mukasey's Ciceronian debating tricks took the place of answering simple questions such as whether the nation's top law enforcement official would in fact enforce the law. If Specter had not put Cheney's project, above his own job description, he would never have approved Mukasey.
It appears- for now- that Mukasey will not defy the Supreme Court following Bush's order to investigating "voter fraud" in Ohio. The Supreme Court is, then, the one power that can forestall an executive's decision. This may be part of the plan- the courts will be in effect legislators, and the people will not like it, and this will give a popular sanction to finally taking it from them. We know the rhetoric about "judicial activism," and how unprepared Democrats have been to answer it. As a matter of fact, though the courts must play this role, it was never meant that this should be the role they always play. It will distort the Judicial branch as much as Cheney has succeeded in distorting the other branches already, and it may be his aim to concentrate power in this way. It is certainly pernicious to be forced to constantly 'interpret' the Court's own decisions when legislating. It will destroy the possibility of legislating, in fact, other than in the secret chambers of the OLC.
That project- expansion of Executive power, and its harnesssing to plutocratic ends- is not what we associate with the venal impulse that leads other politicians to stow 100K in the freezer, and it appears to be an idealistic fervor- an abstract passion. If plutocracy is a set of institutions under the shadow of the corrupt few, it is notable that Cheney himself is corrupt on principle- just as, Gellman reports in "Angler," his meeting with plutocrats in 2001 that was hidden from the public record- illegally- was hidden on principle, and not, as many supposed, for the usual reasons politicians hide meetings with shady execs. This shows a purposiveness that is truly alarming, when compared with the feckless politicians that fill our elected offices.
If Cheney's project is to restore the Imperial Presidency of Nixon,it is a mistake to think that his ambitions were limited to making Bush that Imperial President- he could get only eight years of that from him. He wanted to set precedents, and he took full advantage of his feckless opponents, and it is not at all clear that an electoral landslide will reverse those precedents. I am only speculating as to Cheney's real project, of course. It may be that Obama will solidify Cheney's aims, simply because he will be the only person who has the tools to change the country's course. The goal is in the structure- this is a country of men (or women), not of laws-
Great post, Diachronic.
Here is a speculative answer on your question as to Cheney's principled insistence on a secretive Executive with near plenary powers..
I suspect that the Republicans, ever the faux populists in advertising, but also ever the true elitists in their inner counsels, distrust the people.
They are Hamiltonians through and through, and it is likely they have always distrusted the Article I branch of government, fearing the tribunes of an unruly and redistributionist mob.
The two branches the naturally shelter in are the Article II Executive and Article III Judiciary. It is a very long, technical and doleful story how they are slowly encroaching on the latter and turning it to their ends, but lets just look at the former.
Since the republican elitists (despite the Joe the Plumber marketeering) distrust the mob and the mob's representatives, the presidency seems the best pivot to seize and restrain attacks on the economic status quo. It makes sense-- as the presidency has the narrowest possible selection process. Only two people effectively vie for the position. And the two political parties, not the people choose who the people will vote for. The republicans can guarantee that the presidential nominee of their party will never be a dissident true populist. Heaven forbid!
To counteract the Congress then, the elitist president must be given every advantage, from unsubpoenable aides, to unreviewable signing statements, to hard to overturn last minute executive decisions at the end of office, to binding status of forces agreements that bypass the treaty role of congress, to executive privilege and state secrets privileges that put blinders on the people's true representatives and the courts. And so forth and so on.
Now we have had (with the exception of the 8 year Clinton administration) of a sustained 28 year determined effort to weaken all branches of government, save the Presidency itself. They have so defunded and privatized government that it is unclear to me how Barack is going to proceed once he gets into office. If he decides to continue Cheney's project, and well he might if Congress is subject to republican obstructionism, we might as well start re-writing the political science 101 textbooks about the institutions of federal government.
November 1, 2008 10:29 AM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks for the excellent comments. The Hamiltonianism is one that I naturally am antipathetic to- preferring the Jeffersonian and more localist style of government- the bottom-up derivation of power is so compelling as a model of what this nation could be, though its internal contradictions are highlighted in a fascinating book I have just read, "Dominion of Memories" by Susan Dunn, in which she argues that slavery made the dream that a classless white society was possible- and without classes it is much more easy to convince oneself that bottom-up power is a force that can reach to the very top of Government.
Hamilton, of course, is her counterpoint- and she blasts Jefferson, Madison, and the VA legislature for not working on the kind of vast, Government-funded projects such as the Erie canal, that brought wealth into Northern cities, while VA stagnated.
Most provocatively, she singles out the famous KY and VA Resolutions- in which Jefferson and Madison denounced the Sedition Acts of 1798 as the the oppressive suppressions of free speech that they were- and in particular attacks Jefferson (easily the more radical of the two great Virginians) as being the source of Calhoun's later doctrine of "nullification" which led, inevitably perhaps, to secession.
But when I have always thought of the Resolutions as one of the great achievements of our early history!
And the industrialism of the North, as being, Dunn herself concedes, a fertile source of hypocrisy.
The political science textbooks, I believe, already are obsolete. Article I has been aptly summed up by Cheney in a single devastating phrase: "The power of the purse." That is why its essential attributes, such as habeas corpus, placed strikingly in Article I, needed to be suspended forever, as it hints too much of that awe of the People that the Government must have if it is to be our own.
November 1, 2008 3:50 PM | Reply | Permalink
Have you ever read Jefferson's letter to Kercheval?
What a mind!
November 1, 2008 5:32 PM | Reply | Permalink
No, I hadn't read it. But I greatly appreciate your mentioning it, because I did read it for the first time a few minutes ago.
Jefferson is an astonishingly good writer. Maybe the 'purest' of any writer of his time. I could ket these sentences stare at me for hours...
What really struck me, or that i latched on to, is the pairing of precedent with debt. As in this:
"I am not among those who fear the people. They, and not the rich, are our dependence for continued freedom. And to preserve their independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debts, as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our creeds, as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty�four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses; and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they now do, on oatmeal and potatoes; have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account; but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow�sufferers. Our landholders, too, like theirs, retaining indeed the title and stewardship of estates called theirs, but held really in trust for the treasury, must wander, like theirs, in foreign countries, and be contented with penury, obscurity, exile, and the glory of the nation. This example reads to us the salutary lesson, that private fortunes are destroyed by public as well as by private extravagance. And this is the tendency of all human governments. A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent for a second; that second for a third; and so on, till the bulk of the society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery, and to have no sensibilities left but for sinning and suffering. Then begins, indeed, the bellum omnium in omnia, which some philosophers observing to be so general in this world, have mistaken it for the natural, instead of the abusive state of man. And the fore horse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression."
Jefferson goes on to the famous pasage (I had seen it quoted before) that "Government belongs to the living." And it seems that the part of our lives that is choked off by precedent and dead forms of government is irrecoverable, because we lose the forms that made life possible to earlier generations, and the way for the new generations to move upwards is closed.
Certainly the Government would have us working three jobs to pay off our own debts, and its own. We would not have time to think of remedies.
November 1, 2008 9:13 PM | Reply | Permalink