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« A Quick Walk Through the Bible | Main | Quick Links -- New Scientist Edition » September 16, 2007Power as the Absence of ConstraintFormer Office of Legal Counsel chief Jack Goldsmith has come out with a new book, The Terror Presidency. He's a conservative lawyer who become disillusioned with the recklessness of the Bush White House. The following excerpt jibes with the interviews I've heard with him on the radio: [Dick Cheney's lawyer David] Addington once expressed his general attitude toward accommodation when he said, "We're going to push and push and push until some larger force makes us stop." He and, I presumed, his boss viewed power as the absence of constraint. These men believed that the president would be best equipped to identify and defeat the uncertain, shifting, and lethal new enemy by eliminating all hurdles to the exercise of his power. They had no sense of trading constraint for power. It seemed never to occur to them that it might be possible to increase the president's strength and effectiveness by accepting small limits on his prerogatives in order to secure more significant support from Congress, the courts, or allies. They believed cooperation and compromise signaled weakness and emboldened the enemies of America and the executive branch. When it came to terrorism, they viewed every encounter outside the innermost core of most trusted advisers as a zero-sum game that if they didn't win they would necessarily lose.(via Jesse Walker) Posted by Zach Wendling at September 16, 2007 09:33 PM CommentsPulitzer Prize-winning journalist Charlie Savage (author of Takeover: The Return of the Imperial efforts to expand presidential power) did a week of guest blogging over at TPM Cafe on the Cheney/Bush efforts to expand presidential power. Here's the link: http://tableforone.tpmcafe.com/ Posted by: JohnS at September 17, 2007 12:41 PM | permalink Post a comment |
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