....The salient question of the moment, then, is about Bush’s legal legacy. After his tenure, what will come of the changes his lawyers have wrought, especially their attempts to expand executive power?
Two new books offer contrasting answers. Charlie Savage, the author of “Takeover,” depicts a presidency on steroids, pumped up by Vice President Dick Cheney. For decades, Savage argues, Cheney has “wanted to permanently alter the constitutional balance of American government, establishing powers that future presidents would be able to wield as well.” And because presidential power once accrued generally sticks, Cheney is likely to get his wish. In “The Genius of America,” Eric Lane and Michael Oreskes also rue the increase of presidential power at Congress’s expense. But they think our system of government can recover, if only we can remember and keep faith with the crucial accomplishments of the Constitution’s framers. Viewed through this lens, Bush’s lawyers seem smaller and their influence less enduring.
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Today, however, we’re too weary of our own strife to remember all of this. “The message we are hearing is that our government does not work,” Lane and Oreskes write. “The message we should be hearing is that our government is a reflection of our own divisions.” If Congress is supine, that’s because we’ve helped to beat it down. If we recalled the lessons of the nation’s founding, on the other hand, we’d quit looking for shortcuts and falling for imperially-minded presidents. We’d see the Bush-Cheney march of executive power for the threat that it is. And we’d put a halt to it. A rallying cry, perhaps, for the post-2008 era.
Maybe we should wonder if our educational system failed us. Why are so many people willing to give up so much because the President says we must? The President - and here I write of the office and not the present ninny in the Oval Office - has two major jobs: execute the laws passed by Congress and act as Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces. He is not Der Fuhrer and we have no fuhrerprinzip. So now do Americans act like we should?
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