Savage Love

Reporter Charlie Savage is one of the few people providing serious and skeptical coverage of extra-Constitutional tactics by the present administration. He’s promoting a book (which is worth a look) and participating in a discussion over at TPM. He provides a great example of how journalists could and should be doing their job:

… I get asked a lot about how I got onto this topic. It goes back to 2003, when I began covering Guantanamo and the broader debate about detention and interrogation policy in the war on terrorism.

In 2005, I closely followed the fight over the McCain torture ban in Congress. We all thought the story was over when Bush signed the bill into law, but then the president issued a signing statement telling interrogators that he could authorize them to ignore the law. I wrote about that. Two months later, Bush did the same thing with new oversight provisions in the Patriot Act, and I wrote about that signing statement too. Those two stories got a huge response, and so after that my bureau chief relieved me of daily reporting responsibilities for a month to go find and decipher all the other signing statements Bush had issued since taking office.

The signing statements turned out to be kind of a roadmap to the full implications of the Bush administration’s very broad view of executive power – the White House was claiming that a president was free to ignore laws that had nothing to do with national-security, and was expressing that view at a breathtaking scope: Bush had challenged more laws that all previous presidents combined. This revelation was coming out at the same time the public was learning about the warrantless wiretapping program, in which the White House bypassed a 1978 law. It also came on the heels of the Roberts and Alito nominations, in which Bush had installed two veteran executive branch legal warriors on the Supreme Court who brought with them a history of pushing for maximal presidential powers.

I kept digging more and learned that this agenda of concentrating more unchecked power in the White House was primarily coming out of Vice President Cheney’s office — and, on a day to day level, that it was the handiwork of Cheney’s longtime aide David Addington. I also learned that it long predated 9/11, even though the war on terrorism was the justification most often offered for the push. Following the vice president’s own advice to reporters interested in the warrantless wiretapping program, I dug up a copy of Cheney’s old 1987 Iran-Contra report, blew the dust from its cover, and discovered that he had articulated a vision of nearly limitless commander-in-chief power two decades earlier.

The full sweep and implications of the administration’s project came into sharp focus for me. Like many reporters, I had been focused in on a close-up of one or two controversies, but had been missing the broader context. Now, the camera had zoomed way out to bring the full panorama into view. Suddenly, what the Bush administration had been doing across a huge range of issues made much more sense – not just the 9/11-related controversies, but Cheney’s fight to keep his energy task force papers a secret, the attacks on open-government laws such as FOIA and the Presidential Records Act, the use of executive orders instead of legislation to push the faith-based initiative, the decision to pull out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty without consulting the Senate, the choices for Supreme Court nominations, unprecedented efforts to impose greater White House control over Justice Department lawyers and other executive branch bureaucrats, and many other things. These disparate controversies were all connected. The administration, from its very beginning, had set out to set precedents and take actions that would permanently expand presidential power for the long-term, even when such tactics brought them extra short-term difficulties. A quiet but sweeping constitutional revolution was well underway. …

There’s more. Take a look.

UPDATE: Added today, commentary on fealty as the dominant factor in Supreme Court judicial nominees by the Bush administration.

In 2005, when President Bush nominated John Roberts, Harriet Miers, and then Samuel Alito to fill the first two Supreme Court vacancies in a decade, observers outside the executive branch largely evaluated the nominees through the lens of social issues such as abortion rights. Lost amid the hubbub (especially for the first two nominations, which concluded before the warrantless wiretapping program came to light and before Bush issued the torture ban signing statement) was what I believe to be an essential factor behind all three nominations. There was a broad array of prominent and very conservative legal scholars and lower-court judges from which the Bush-Cheney legal team could have selected its nominees. Tellingly, the administration chose all three from a very narrow slice of the conservative legal universe: all three were executive branch legal warriors. They had each spent years marinating in disputes over expanding executive powers from the White House’s perspective, and were thus likely to bring a very deferential attitude to the bench when future lawsuits arose over aggressive claims of presidential authority. ….

Not news, but it’s interesting to see this emerging in political discourse. The summary phase of the Bush era is picking up steam.

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