Marcy Wheeler: Curbing the Imperial Presidency

[babylonsister]

http://thenexthurrah.typepad.com/the_next_hurrah/2007/06/curbing_the_imp.html#more

Curbing the Imperial Presidency

by emptywheel

Here is my presentation from the Take Back American panel on "Curbing the Imperial Presidency." I'm sure it didn't come out this way. But it might be close.

One year after the publication of his book The Imperial Presidency, Arthur Schlesinger wrote the following for a column in Harpers:

We hear a great deal today about the presumably grim consequences of the impeachment of the President—an endless public trial, a people divided, a government paralyzed, a nation disgraced before the world. But suppose the House of Representatives should decide not to impeach Mr. Nixon. That would have its consequences, too—consequences that deserve at least as careful an examination.

For the refusal to impeach would be a decision as momentous as impeachment itself. It would and could be interpreted only as meaning that Congress does not think Mr. Nixon has done anything to warrant impeachment. It would alter the historic relationship of Presidential power to the constitutional system of accountability for the use of that power. The message our generation would send to posterity would be that Mr. Nixon, whatever his other disasters, had conceived and established a new conception of Presidential accountability, and that his successors, so long as they take care to avoid the crudities of a Watergate burglary, can expect to inherit Mr. Nixon’s conception of inherent Presidential authority and to wield the unshared power with which he will have endowed the Presidency. Failure to impeach would be a vindication of a revolutionary theory of Presidential accountability.

Now, I agree with Schlesinger. The fear of an endless public trial, of government paralyzed, of international disgrace—those are not sufficient reasons to avoid impeaching a President (or Vice President or Attorney General) who has overstepped his constitutional authority.

But at the same time, the perspective of thirty years makes it clear. Impeaching Nixon was not sufficient to curb Nixon’s dangerous theories of inherent power. On the contrary, with the impeachment, those theories metastasized into the body of Dick Cheney and others. (I’m a breast cancer survivor and I’m reminded by what can happen when a primary tumor is removed—the removal can actually make it easier for metastases to grow their own blood supply and thus become viable. I don’t usually favor cancer as a metaphor, but in the case of Dick Cheney, I think it is an apt comparison.)

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[enid602]

1. imperial

Who in the hell ever imagined that we'd still be so concerned with 'imperial presidencies' 30 years after? Do we ever learn? What's our fearless leader's famous line? Fool me once . . .