The Imperial Presidency

Remember 2008 when many of us voted for Obama as a repudiation of the Bush administration?

That was nice huh? After 8 years of an imperious presidency that blithely moved beyond constitutional limits on its authority, it was wonderful, WONDERFUL to be able to at last vote in a man that wouldn't possibly assert the same sort of executive powers that we Bush laid claim to.

Yeah, those were the good, old days.

Sadly, the optimism was poorly, poorly placed. Glenn Greenwald:

Yesterday, Hillary Clinton told the House of Representatives that "the White House would forge ahead with military action in Libya even if Congress passed a resolution constraining the mission."  As TPM put it:  "the administration would ignore any and all attempts by Congress to shackle President Obama's power as commander in chief to make military and wartime decisions," as such attempts would constitute "an unconstitutional encroachment on executive power."  As Democratic Rep. Brad Sherman noted, Clinton was not relying on the War Powers Resolution of 1973 (WPR); to the contrary, her position is that the Obama administration has the power to wage war in violation even of the permissive dictates of that Resolution.  And, of course, the Obama administration has indeed involved the U.S. in a major, risky war, in a country that has neither attacked us nor threatened to, without even a pretense of Congressional approval or any form of democratic consent.  Whether the U.S. should go to war is a decision, they obviously believe, "for the President alone to make."

Initially, I defy anyone to identify any differences between the administration's view of its own authority -- that it has the right to ignore Congressional restrictions on its war powers -- and the crux of Bush radicalism as expressed in the once-controversial memos by John Yoo and the Bush DOJ.  There is none.  That's why Yoo went to The Wall Street Journal to lavish praise on Obama's new war power theory:  because it's Yoo's theory (as I was finishing this post, I saw that Adam Serwer makes a similar point today).  If anything, one could argue that Yoo's theory of unilateral war-making was more reasonable, as it was at least tied to an actual attack on the U.S.:  the 9/11 attacks.  Here, the Obama administration is arrogating unto the President the unilateral, unrestrained right to start wars in all circumstances, whether or not the U.S. is attacked.