Is presidential power a one-way ratchet? Has Cheney succeeded?
Several people in the comments section yesterday questioned my contention that presidential power is not a partisan issue because future Democratic presidents will enjoy the same enhanced authorities that the Bush-Cheney administration has pioneered. They noted that the push to concentrate more power in the White House in recent decades has been largely the work of Republican administrations, and they argued that a future Democratic administration would behave differently. So this raises a question worth examining in more detail: Will the Cheney Project outlive the Bush-Cheney administration? As many of you know, my new account of the Bush-Cheney administration’s efforts to expand presidential power, Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy, is coming out alongside Jack Goldsmith’s new memoir of his 10-month tenure as head of the Office of Legal Counsel, The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration. Our books com
