'In war, it’s power to the president
Nov. 20 —  The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the war in Afghanistan have dramatically accelerated a push by the Bush administration to strengthen presidential powers, giving President Bush a dominance over American government exceeding that of other post-Watergate presidents and rivaling even Franklin D. Roosevelt’s command.

ON A wide variety of fronts, the administration has moved to seize power that it has shared with other branches of government. In foreign policy, Bush announced vast cuts in the U.S. nuclear arsenal but resisted putting the cuts in a treaty — thereby averting a Senate ratification vote. In domestic policy, the administration proposed reorganizing the Immigration and Naturalization Service without the congressional action lawmakers sought. And in legal policy, the administration seized the judiciary’s power as Bush signed an order allowing terrorists to be tried in military tribunals.

Those actions, all taken last week, build on earlier Bush efforts to augment White House power, including initiatives to limit intelligence briefings to members of Congress, take new spending authority from the legislature, and expand the executive branch’s power to monitor and detain those it suspects of terrorism.
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Now, in the views of many scholars, Bush has restored the “Imperial Presidency,” a term Arthur Schlesinger Jr. used to describe Richard M. Nixon’s administration in 1973. “The power President Bush is wielding today is truly breathtaking,” said Tim Lynch, director of the Project on Criminal Justice at the libertarian Cato Institute. “A single individual is going to decide whether the war is expanded to Iraq. A single individual is going to decide how much privacy American citizens are going to retain.”
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The public — and Congress — seem content for Bush to assume as much power as he desires.
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This pattern of consolidating presidential authority has extended to other areas of governance. Bush issued an executive order allowing a sitting president to block release of a predecessor’s records, undermining a law Congress passed about such papers. When an open-meeting law prevented Bush’s Social Security commission from meeting privately, the group split into two so the law would not apply. In foreign affairs, the administration has shown a distaste for international treaties that require congressional ratification, recently rejecting amendments to the Biological Weapons Convention in favor of actions that wouldn’t require legislative approval.
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Bush has opposed Congress granting statutory authority to Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge, which has allowed Ridge to refuse congressional requests for him to testify. Bush’s Justice Department decided, without the usual waiting period for public comment, that it could listen in on lawyer-client conversations if Attorney General John D. Ashcroft believes it necessary to prevent terrorism; he could do so even if people have not been charged and even in the absence of a court order. That move followed congressional approval of the USA Patriot Act, which makes it easier for the government to monitor, search, detain or deport suspects and gives the Justice Department more power to detain immigrants without charges. Also this month, the government stopped saying how many people it has detained related to the Sept. 11 attacks.'

DaanSpeak
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