More power than many monarchs

Jeffrey Pasley has written a thoughtful, even-handed, and well-reasoned piece on debate over the power of the president, a debate that has been going on since the founding of the Republic. It's a debate in which both sides' arguments have validity. Pasley, however, sees something different in the latest declarations of "the unitary Executive" the Cheney administration has been making.

Despite my obvious preferences in present politics, the underlying philosophical question here is still an open one for me. All governments probably do have inherent powers they will have to exercise in times of crisis. Lincoln certainly faced one and probably made the most courageous and far-sighted choice. Yet we should be clear that we are doing just that—making a choice—when we endorse government action based on such thinking. Governing on the basis of inherent powers rather than clear legal-constitutional authority is a distinctly undemocratic, illiberal, and un-American approach to governance. As Lincoln recognized, it should be used sparingly and only when absolutely and indispensably necessary.

The problem comes when leaders manipulate the public sense of crisis to make extraconstitutional powers and presidential monarchy thinkable. The modern American Right has a long record of promoting phony or highly exaggerated crises for political effect, often as a way to attack aspects of democracy, especially the economic, cultural, and intellectual expressions of it that conservatives so dislike. Extensive freedom of expression, strict protections for the rights of the accused, and other civil liberties have never been popular with the dominant elements of the American Right, and strangely enough, the present crisis—whatever it is—always seems to demand that civil liberties be curtailed in some way. The 9/11 terrorist attacks only provided a more easily salable version of the ongoing crisis that the Right has been ringing alarm bells over for the past sixty years or more. The sudden salience of Islamic terrorism as an issue allowed Republicans to revive many of their old cold war themes and policies and provided the opportunity to apply them in Iraq.

Where Bush/Cheney differ from Lincoln and Hamilton, is that the latter, while believing in a president who is essentially monarchical, made the modern and democratic transition from believing in a monarch given his authority from God (or some watery tart), to a monarch given his authority "by the people." Bush/Cheney, on the other hand, have nothing but contempt for "the people," who in order to be protected by the God/king, must be lied to and kept in the dark. They see their authority vested in them by God.