Absolute Executive

Dahlia Lithwick connects the dots between Guantanamo, the Padilla Case, and presidential signing statements

Link: The real reason the Bush administration won't back down on Guantanamo. - By Dahlia Lithwick - Slate Magazine.

But it has finally become clear that the goal of these foolish efforts isn't really to win the war against terrorism; indeed, nothing about Padilla, Guantanamo, or signing statements moves the country an inch closer to eradicating terror. The object is a larger one, and the original overarching goal of this administration: expanding executive power, for its own sake.

Lithwick cites an NPR report by Nina Totenberg:

According to Totenberg, when the Supreme Court sent Padilla's case back to the lower federal courts on technical grounds in 2004, the Bush administration's sole concern was preserving its constitutional claim that it could hold citizens as enemy combatants. "Justice Department officials warned that if the case went back to the Supreme Court, the administration would almost certainly lose," she reports, which is why Padilla was hauled back to the lower courts. Her sources further confirmed that "key players in the Defense Department and Vice President Cheney's office insisted that the power to detain Americans as enemy combatants had to be preserved."

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Guantanamo stays open for the same reason Padilla stays on trial. Having claimed the right to label enemy combatants and detain them indefinitely without charges, the Bush administration is unable to retreat from that position without ceding ground.

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Last spring, The New Yorker's Jane Mayer profiled David Addington, Vice President Richard Cheney's chief of staff and legal adviser. Addington's worldview in brief: A single-minded devotion to something called the New Paradigm, a constitutional theory of virtually limitless executive power, wherein "the President, as Commander-in-Chief, has the authority to disregard virtually all previously known legal boundaries, if national security demands it," Mayer describes.

Comments

[NotOften]

You know Jodi, I just keep coming back to your article contra David Corn. Bush must impeached if even half of this is true.

[Jodi]

Not Often--I fully agree. The case for impeachment is clear. Not impeaching aquiesces to this new, frightening, vision of executive power.

[PW]

The problem is that impeachment isn't a judicial process but a political one. And so an impeachment of Bush would be seen as a political act by those we most need to persuade.

I'm tending towards rigorous Congressional investigations which produce evidence making Bush's actions incontrovertibly illegal and clearly unconstitutional. That may be the only way the "vengeful" and "despairing" could be persuaded that Bush is not a hero. I'm not sure the current Congress is up to that.

This is a terrific blog, Jodi!