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"The Bush Legacy" from the McClellan Chronicles
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<blockquote data-quote="wkmac" data-source="post: 353462" data-attributes="member: 2189"><p><span style="font-size: 18px"><strong><em>The Cult of the Presidency</em> </strong></span></p><p><span style="font-size: 18px"><span style="font-size: 12px"><strong><em>Readings in the Age of Empire</em></strong></span> </span></p><p><span style="font-size: 10px">By Doug Bandow</span></p><p> </p><p><span style="font-size: 10px"><span style="font-size: 26px"><strong>A</strong></span>merican liberty is dying. For years the process has been slow strangulation, as successive Congresses and presidents, irrespective of party, expanded government power. True, Republicans usually tightened the garrote a bit less quickly. But the end point was the same: the expansive, expensive welfare-warfare state. </span></p><p> </p><p><span style="font-size: 10px">Alas, both parties have combined to give the growth of government authority a dangerous twist: the aggrandizement of the executive. This has been a constant in wartime: Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt all used the alleged necessity of war to justify enormous expansion of not just their congressionally enacted powers, but also their supposed unilateral authority. Last century Democratic presidents led the way in exalting the executive, but now the Republican Party, while endlessly blathering on about individual liberty and limited government, is claiming that the president is a democratically-elected king.</span></p><p> </p><p><span style="font-size: 10px">The Republican worship of unilateral executive power has reached its apotheosis in the Bush administration. Taken seriously, President George W. Bush claims to have the right to ignore the Constitution at home for as long as we are at war – which means forever, since the "war on terrorism" has no obvious endpoint and the battlefield is the entire world, including the United States. Admittedly, President Bush so far has not fully exercised these extraordinary powers, which logically include the authority to disband the Supreme Court and prorogue Congress for interfering with his attempt to protect America from terrorism. But if the president can designate an American citizen arrested in America as an enemy combatant to be held incommunicado by the military without access to legal counsel for years, then is there anything the president cannot do?</span></p><p> </p><p><span style="font-size: 10px">Gene Healy, a scholar at the Cato Institute, tracks the growth in executive power in his new book, <em>The Cult of the Presidency</em>. The story he tells is extraordinary, and is extraordinarily important. Consider the role of the presidency intended by the nation's founders, compared to what it is today. Healy opens with the claim by former Arkansas Gov. Michael Huckabee that "America needs positive, optimistic leadership to kind of turn this country around, to see a revival of our national soul." Not restore our liberties and restraints on government. Not even reform public programs to meet pressing social needs. But revive America's soul.</span></p><p> </p><p><span style="font-size: 10px">Healy wonders what kind of crisis has Michael Huckabee as the solution. More seriously, he asks, "what sort of office did Huckabee imagine he was running for? Is reviving the national soul in the job description? And if reviving the national soul is part of the president's job, what <em>isn't</em>?"</span></p><p> </p><p><span style="font-size: 10px">The answer, he concludes, is not much. And among the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates, only Rep. Ron Paul, the iconoclastic Republican candidate for president, believed his role was to fulfill the limited powers bestowed by the Constitution, rather than to console and uplift 300 million Americans.</span></p><p> </p><p><span style="font-size: 10px">The essential point is that whatever the partisan differences between the two major parties – and the discourse has grown increasingly acrid – there is little disagreement over treating the president as national pastor, counselor, philanthropist, economic manager, symbol, guardian angel, psychoanalyst, investor, global leader, popular voice, and righter-of-all-wrongs. Writes Healy: "many of the same people who condemn the growing concentration of power in the executive branch also embrace a virtually limitless notion of presidential responsibility. Today, politics is as bitterly partisan as it's been in three decades, and the Bush presidency is at the center of the fight. But amid all the bitterness, it's easy to miss the fact that, at bottom, both Left and Right agree on the boundless nature of presidential responsibility."</span></p><p> </p><p><span style="font-size: 10px">That isn't the government established by the Founders, of course. Politicians and pundits on the Right routinely praise the brilliance and prescience of those who framed the Constitution, but none among the latter would recognize today's government as related to, let alone the logical outcome of, their labors. They would be appalled at and horrified by the monster their original government of few enumerated powers had become. And the Founders would have been particularly horrified by the fact that the president of today is far more powerful – and thus far more dangerous – than the king of yesteryear, against whom they revolted.</span></p><p> </p><p><span style="font-size: 10px">Healy provides a good summary of the institutions of government as originally established by the Constitution. He is particularly effective in disposing of what he terms "unitarian heresies," the bizarre notion, advanced today by many conservatives, that the Founders intended to provide the president with monarchical powers. (True, the "unitarians," as Healy playfully calls them, prefer not to put it that way. But what else should one call the authority to initiate war, arrest citizens, abrogate constitutional rights, torture suspected adversaries, ignore the legislature, and much more?) The Constitution would not have made it out of the constitutional convention, let alone been ratified by the states, if this kind of unitarian theory had been advanced at the time.</span></p><p> </p><p><span style="font-size: 10px">The first major, sustained ideological assault on constitutional government came from the left, most notably the Progressives. Both Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson were Progressive exemplars. The first was a thorough-going imperialist, the second a messianic racist. Both expanded power in peace and war. Wilson took America into World War I, an entirely unnecessary war which was irrelevant to U.S. interests and culminated in the unjust and unsustainable Versailles Treaty, which a generation later naturally led to another conflict, the worst in human history.</span></p><p> </p><p><span style="font-size: 10px">Two "normal" presidencies followed, of Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge. But Herbert Hoover was an economic micro-manager and meddler, who appears conservative only in comparison to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who began the sustained era of the "heroic presidency." Explains Healy, "well before the war, it had become clear that increasing numbers of Americans looked to the president for personal help in a way that would have seemed peculiar – even dishonorable – to their fathers and grandfathers. Before the advent of the modern presidency, few Americans had bothered to write to the president, who was, after all, a distant official in Washington with duties that only rarely had a direct impact on ordinary people. FDR's revolutionary presidency changed all that."</span></p><p> </p><p>end part 1</p><p> </p><p>source: <a href="http://antiwar.com/bandow/?articleid=12975" target="_blank"><strong><span style="color: red">http://antiwar.com/bandow/?articleid=12975</span></strong></a></p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="wkmac, post: 353462, member: 2189"] [SIZE=5][B][I]The Cult of the Presidency[/I] [/B][/SIZE] [SIZE=5][SIZE=3][B][I]Readings in the Age of Empire[/I][/B][/SIZE] [/SIZE] [SIZE=2]By Doug Bandow[/SIZE] [SIZE=2][SIZE=7][B]A[/B][/SIZE]merican liberty is dying. For years the process has been slow strangulation, as successive Congresses and presidents, irrespective of party, expanded government power. True, Republicans usually tightened the garrote a bit less quickly. But the end point was the same: the expansive, expensive welfare-warfare state. [/SIZE] [SIZE=2]Alas, both parties have combined to give the growth of government authority a dangerous twist: the aggrandizement of the executive. This has been a constant in wartime: Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt all used the alleged necessity of war to justify enormous expansion of not just their congressionally enacted powers, but also their supposed unilateral authority. Last century Democratic presidents led the way in exalting the executive, but now the Republican Party, while endlessly blathering on about individual liberty and limited government, is claiming that the president is a democratically-elected king.[/SIZE] [SIZE=2]The Republican worship of unilateral executive power has reached its apotheosis in the Bush administration. Taken seriously, President George W. Bush claims to have the right to ignore the Constitution at home for as long as we are at war – which means forever, since the "war on terrorism" has no obvious endpoint and the battlefield is the entire world, including the United States. Admittedly, President Bush so far has not fully exercised these extraordinary powers, which logically include the authority to disband the Supreme Court and prorogue Congress for interfering with his attempt to protect America from terrorism. But if the president can designate an American citizen arrested in America as an enemy combatant to be held incommunicado by the military without access to legal counsel for years, then is there anything the president cannot do?[/SIZE] [SIZE=2]Gene Healy, a scholar at the Cato Institute, tracks the growth in executive power in his new book, [I]The Cult of the Presidency[/I]. The story he tells is extraordinary, and is extraordinarily important. Consider the role of the presidency intended by the nation's founders, compared to what it is today. Healy opens with the claim by former Arkansas Gov. Michael Huckabee that "America needs positive, optimistic leadership to kind of turn this country around, to see a revival of our national soul." Not restore our liberties and restraints on government. Not even reform public programs to meet pressing social needs. But revive America's soul.[/SIZE] [SIZE=2]Healy wonders what kind of crisis has Michael Huckabee as the solution. More seriously, he asks, "what sort of office did Huckabee imagine he was running for? Is reviving the national soul in the job description? And if reviving the national soul is part of the president's job, what [I]isn't[/I]?"[/SIZE] [SIZE=2]The answer, he concludes, is not much. And among the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates, only Rep. Ron Paul, the iconoclastic Republican candidate for president, believed his role was to fulfill the limited powers bestowed by the Constitution, rather than to console and uplift 300 million Americans.[/SIZE] [SIZE=2]The essential point is that whatever the partisan differences between the two major parties – and the discourse has grown increasingly acrid – there is little disagreement over treating the president as national pastor, counselor, philanthropist, economic manager, symbol, guardian angel, psychoanalyst, investor, global leader, popular voice, and righter-of-all-wrongs. Writes Healy: "many of the same people who condemn the growing concentration of power in the executive branch also embrace a virtually limitless notion of presidential responsibility. Today, politics is as bitterly partisan as it's been in three decades, and the Bush presidency is at the center of the fight. But amid all the bitterness, it's easy to miss the fact that, at bottom, both Left and Right agree on the boundless nature of presidential responsibility."[/SIZE] [SIZE=2]That isn't the government established by the Founders, of course. Politicians and pundits on the Right routinely praise the brilliance and prescience of those who framed the Constitution, but none among the latter would recognize today's government as related to, let alone the logical outcome of, their labors. They would be appalled at and horrified by the monster their original government of few enumerated powers had become. And the Founders would have been particularly horrified by the fact that the president of today is far more powerful – and thus far more dangerous – than the king of yesteryear, against whom they revolted.[/SIZE] [SIZE=2]Healy provides a good summary of the institutions of government as originally established by the Constitution. He is particularly effective in disposing of what he terms "unitarian heresies," the bizarre notion, advanced today by many conservatives, that the Founders intended to provide the president with monarchical powers. (True, the "unitarians," as Healy playfully calls them, prefer not to put it that way. But what else should one call the authority to initiate war, arrest citizens, abrogate constitutional rights, torture suspected adversaries, ignore the legislature, and much more?) The Constitution would not have made it out of the constitutional convention, let alone been ratified by the states, if this kind of unitarian theory had been advanced at the time.[/SIZE] [SIZE=2]The first major, sustained ideological assault on constitutional government came from the left, most notably the Progressives. Both Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson were Progressive exemplars. The first was a thorough-going imperialist, the second a messianic racist. Both expanded power in peace and war. Wilson took America into World War I, an entirely unnecessary war which was irrelevant to U.S. interests and culminated in the unjust and unsustainable Versailles Treaty, which a generation later naturally led to another conflict, the worst in human history.[/SIZE] [SIZE=2]Two "normal" presidencies followed, of Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge. But Herbert Hoover was an economic micro-manager and meddler, who appears conservative only in comparison to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who began the sustained era of the "heroic presidency." Explains Healy, "well before the war, it had become clear that increasing numbers of Americans looked to the president for personal help in a way that would have seemed peculiar – even dishonorable – to their fathers and grandfathers. Before the advent of the modern presidency, few Americans had bothered to write to the president, who was, after all, a distant official in Washington with duties that only rarely had a direct impact on ordinary people. FDR's revolutionary presidency changed all that."[/SIZE] end part 1 source: [URL="http://antiwar.com/bandow/?articleid=12975"][B][COLOR=red]http://antiwar.com/bandow/?articleid=12975[/COLOR][/B][/URL] [/QUOTE]
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