No lame duck, Bush has big plans to push through an imperial
Focusing on this president's belief that Article II of the Constitution enables him to appoint himself dictator, the conservative columnist George Will reminds us of President Harry Truman's 1952 attempt to assert his own "inherent powers" in order to take over the nation's steel mills and prevent a wartime strike (the war in question being the Korean War). The Supreme Court confronted Truman\ufffdlike Van Helsing waving a cross before Dracula\ufffdwith the Constitution's separation of powers. In a concurring opinion that I hope the members of the current Supreme Court are familiar with, Justice Robert Jackson thundered:
"No penance would ever expiate the sin against free government of holding that a president can escape control of executive power by law through assuming his military role . . . . [Historians] have discovered no technique for long preserving free government except that the Executive be under the law. . . . "
Among the Democratic presidential candidates, only Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut has introduced a bill, the Restructuring the Constitution Act, that cuts out some of this president's most dangerous exclusive powers under the Military Commissions Act of 2006. Unlike Dodd, the two leading Democratic contenders, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, have not focused on this regal assumption of unconstitutional authority, which few Americans are likely to have in mind when they vote in November 2008 (though Dennis Kucinich has spoken of it).
But as George Will angrily writes in Newsweek's August 13 issue, the Military Commissions Act, building on the Bush administration's previous arrogation of dark powers, "treats all of America as a battlefield on which even American citizens can be declared 'enemy combatants,' seized and held indefinitely, as intelligence can be collected by any means the president orders"\ufffdsomething that Bush's July 2006 executive order on the CIA's torture techniques further asserts.
I can't see our current Supreme Court making any such statement in an attempt to rein in this president.
