Book review worth reading - Bush and the Secret Government

Take the time to read Shadow government Inside the Bush administration's sweeping, often secretive efforts to expand the power of the presidency. The Boston Globe published a balanced review of the currents books looking at how Bush has secretly governed the country.

The larger issues raised by Savage and Goldsmith are how we govern ourselves as a people. The Bush-Cheney team has been insisting that in time of war the Constitution and common sense tell us that the president must be entrusted with the power to protect the nation as he and he alone sees fit; neither the Congress nor international treaties agreed to by the United States should bind him. The administration has a legitimate point that the president and his team must be able to act quickly and forcefully in the face of threats. But in its zeal, as Savage and Goldsmith argue, it has been defying the Founders' express desire for checks and balances. As much as Madison and Hamilton wanted an effective executive, they also wanted to avoid an autocratic president. Down that road, as they saw, is a loss of liberty, so they invented instead, as Richard Neustadt observed, a system of "separated institutions sharing powers." If there were any remaining question, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor surely provided the answer in the Supreme Court's decision of 2004 in the Hamdi v. Rumsfeld case: "A state of war is not a blank check for the president."