“ The assertion and expansion of presidential power is arguably the defining feature of the Bush years. Come January, the current administration will pass on to its successor a vast infrastructure for electronic surveillance, secret sites for detention and interrogation and a sheaf of legal opinions empowering the executive to do whatever he feels necessary to protect the country. The new administration will also be the beneficiary of Congress’s recent history of complacency, which amounts to a tacit acceptance of the Bush administration’s expansive views of executive authority. For that matter, thanks to the recent economic bailout, Bush’s successor will inherit control over much of the banking industry. “The next president will enter office as the most powerful president who has ever sat in the White House,” Jack Balkin, a constitutional law professor at Yale and an influential legal blogger, told me a few weeks ago.
Jonathan Mahler in the NYT. This is what I’ve been saying for the last six years or so to my conservative friends: you can support this unprecedented expansion of executive power now, but then you’ll be stuck with it the next time a Democrat is in the White House — and that Democrat may not be as sympathetic to you or your causes. I actually don’t expect President Obama to use those powers as enthusiastically as President Bush did, but who knows what the next few years will bring? The fundamental lesson always applies: it’s very easy to give up freedoms, almost impossible to get them back. (via ayjay)
3 years ago
