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Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Law - NYT review of Charlie Savage's book on presidential power
Michiko Kakutani of the NY Times has a good review today of a new book the ILB has been reading, Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy, by Boston Globe reporter and Fort Wayne native Charlie Savage.
The ILB has had a number of earlier entries on Savage's Pulitzer Prize winning stories on presidential signing statements and the theory of the unitary executive.
From today's article:
Mr. Savage won a Pulitzer Prize this year for a series of articles he wrote for The Globe about executive power and Mr. Bush’s use of “signing statements,” which the president has attached to dozens of laws enacted by Congress, asserting his authority to disregard certain provisions because they conflicted with his interpretation of the Constitution. With “Takeover” Mr. Savage has expanded those articles into a book that is important reading for anyone interested in how the current administration has amped up presidential power while trying to undermine Congress’s powers of oversight and the independence of the judiciary. * * *But this volume is distinguished by his ability to pull together myriad story lines into a succinct, overarching narrative that is energized by his own legal legwork and interviews with key figures like John C. Yoo, a former deputy assistant attorney general, and Brent Scowcroft, who was national security adviser to the first President Bush.
Mr. Savage — who holds a master’s degree from Yale Law School — not only situates moves made by the current administration in historical perspective with earlier assertions of unilateral presidential power (made by the likes of Harry S. Truman and Nixon), but also shrewdly assesses those moves in terms of mainstream constitutional scholarship. * * *
At the end of this chilling volume Mr. Savage offers a concise and powerful conclusion: “The expansive presidential powers claimed and exercised by the Bush-Cheney White House are now an immutable part of American history — not controversies but facts. The importance of such precedents is difficult to overstate. As Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson once warned, any new claim of executive power, once validated into precedent, ‘lies about like a loaded weapon ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need. Every repetition embeds that principle more deeply in our law and thinking and expands it to new purposes.’
“Sooner or later, there will always be another urgent need.”
Posted by Marcia Oddi on September 25, 2007 12:14 PM
Posted to General Law Related