It’s not too soon to start calling this for what it is: the Bush administration’s creeping monarchism.
The Times has a piece today on some critical testimony Attorney General Al Gonzales delivered yesterday on Capitol Hill. The president, he suggested, probably does have the authority to conduct warrantless domestic wiretaps.
This comes on the heels of the president’s view, summarized in today’s Post by an unnamed senior administration official, that “Bush sees a distinction between leaks and what he is alleged to have done. The official said Bush authorized the release of the classified information to assure the public of his rationale for war as it was coming under increasing scrutiny.”
We’ve already discussed the fact that the president has the authority to declassify anything, albeit through certain guidelines and procedures he appears not to have followed in this case. The fact that he seems to have done so with the Libby leaks for clearly political and thus inappropriate reasons doesn’t make it illegal in itself. And I think the claim that the president didn’t follow the appropriate procedures in ‘declassifying’ in this case would be too fine a distinction for a court to want to touch. (For an alternative view, see Juliette Kayyem’s discussion of this. She says it may well be illegal.)
Setting all that aside, what is most revealing is the attitude suggested by the White House official rather than just the net outcome. Beyond the legal particulars, the president’s attitude seems to be that the law just doesn’t apply to him — and that’s not surprising since we see so many other instances of that perspective in practice.
Peel back all the individual arguments from Al Gonzales and the president and whomever else they put forward, the underlying idea is not so much that the president is above the law as that he is the law. He embodies it, you might say, even embodies the state itself. And thus what he does can’t be illegal. What he does is simply the state cogitating and defending itself.
This is a vision that simply incompatible with any idea of separation of powers because in this view the president’s prerogative always trumps the other two branches. And that makes it a grave danger to our constitutional system itself.
