THE WANDERER, DECEMBER 29, 2005
JOSEPH SOBRAN'S
WASHINGTON WATCH
Bush's "Implied" Powers
Another inglorious week for President Bush. The NEW
YORK TIMES disclosed that he'd authorized apparently
illegal surveillance of U.S. citizens suspected of ties
to terrorists.
He and his team admitted this was substantially
true but defended the practice, while saying it was
within his legal powers and his duty to defend Americans,
and that he'd kept Congress informed of it. He called the
leak to the TIMES "a shameful act," and suggested that
any leakers will be hunted out and punished.
He got a lot of argument on all this, especially
but not exclusively from Democrats who denied having been
fully informed, while four Senate Republicans joined the
Democrats to block renewal of the USA PATRIOT Act. He
said it was "inexcusable" for the Senate to let the act
expire. Members of both parties promised a full
investigation of his surveillance.
But at his December 19 press conference, Bush
refused to back down. He tried to be reassuring, but he
left a lot of questions unanswered.
On such sensitive matters as surveillance, torture,
and the Iraq war itself, Bush is losing even Republican
support, and the Democrats, long intimidated, are
emboldened.
He is being scolded by conservative and libertarian
opinion leaders like George Will, who chides him for
forgetting conservatives' traditional qualms about
untrammeled executive power, and Ivan Eland of the
Independence Institute, who calls his actions
"unconstitutional and illegal," even "impeachable
offenses."
Bush's understanding of the Constitution and of his
seemingly limitless "implied" wartime powers isn't widely
shared outside neoconservative circles, where Lincoln and
Franklin Roosevelt are deemed exemplary wartime leaders;
he has apparently been getting legal advice from Harriet
Miers again, in whom, as in Condoleezza Rice, he has
found a gal who cain't say no to executive claims.
Vice President Dick Cheney astounded nobody by
joining the defense of Bush's surveillance, noting that
there have been no terrorist attacks in this country
since 9/11, with the implied non sequitur. But what do we
have to show for these breaches of law? Does such spying
really achieve anything?
Once more, we are expected to have faith that it
does, on the presumption that the president and his team
"know more than we do" and know how to use what they
know. Which is assuming a lot. It's rather naive, like
the "tough-minded" belief that torture is an effective
(if perhaps regrettable) method of extorting truth.
The fact is that Bush looks incompetent, and this
will be a hard impression to reverse. He has been
convicted in the court of late-night comedy, from which
there is no appeal. That's where presidential reputations
go to die, as Bush's father and Bill Clinton can attest.
You can't refute a belly laugh. It means that people have
made up their minds about you.
One danger of a second term, seldom observed, is
that it's when a president may become ridiculous and lose
his dignity irrecoverably. Ronald Reagan avoided it by
directing his humor at himself; Bush isn't so good at
this disarming tactic. His brittle self-justification
only provokes his enemies to angry laughter. When you
give people the stark choice of being with you or against
you, you're asking for trouble.
But how much respect should a president get,
anyway? What we are now witnessing, I believe, is
something that didn't start with Bush: the age-old
struggle over monarchism. Many men always hanker for a
monarch, a hero, a single charismatic leader, even a
ruler claiming divine attributes, like the Caesars.
The United States began as a self-consciously
anti-monarchical republic, and the presidency was
deliberately designed to contrast with the British
monarchy. A king could not be lawfully overthrown, and
legally he "could do no wrong," but the American
president was himself subject to the law, and to peaceful
removal by election or, if necessary, impeachment.
Yet even here the monarchical impulse has often
burst forth, especially in wartime, turning presidents
into quasi monarchs; our republican tradition was put to
its severest test (save one) by Franklin Roosevelt, who
greatly enlarged executive power and broke with precedent
by seeking four terms, the last two for the purpose of
waging war. This in turn provoked the anti-monarchical
reaction of the 22nd Amendment, forbidding third terms.
Ominously, Bush's supporters like to cite the
mendacious Roosevelt as an inspiring model of
presidential conduct.
Bush's Monarchic Predecessors
No American politician would dare to admit he
entertained such monarchical ambitions or sympathies as
Alexander Hamilton was accused of harboring. The charge
of doing so has always stung; during the Civil War,
Clement Vallandigham, an Ohio congressman, referred to
the power-grabbing president, with bitter sarcasm, as
"King Lincoln."
The president retaliated by having him arrested and
exiled to Canada, thereby proving the point.
Arbitrary arrest and summary punishment for critics
were features of the Lincoln administration, and
Lincoln's crackdown on dissent -- in the North! --
remains the great untold story of that war. Some "new
birth of freedom"! Lincoln not only called secession
"treason" and "rebellion," but treated even belief in the
right of secession as sedition and subversion.
Though he ceaselessly quoted the Declaration of
Independence, the "all Men are created equal" part
anyway, he ignored the parts about "the Consent of the
Governed" and "Free and Independent States" that formed
the philosophical basis of the Constitution.
He never faced the clear implication of "Free and
Independent": that each of the sovereign states, North
and South, retained the right to dissociate itself from
the Union. Far from acknowledging this as either their
natural or their constitutional right, he denied their
sovereignty and claimed the authority to do whatever it
took to keep them in the Union, even if this meant
violating the Constitution he had taken a solemn oath
before God to defend.
But Lincoln is now revered as the greatest American
president, indeed as the greatest American, period. He
has been deified as truly as any Roman emperor, and what
is now called the "imperial presidency" is largely his
creation.
An awesome figure, Lincoln, dwarfing even Napoleon
in tragic stature and in the destruction he caused. It
was his genius to make his enemies underestimate him, and
I can't help feeling that his most devout admirers don't
fully appreciate him either.
+ + +
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--- Joseph Sobran
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