I think that what keeps us from going down that road is the constitution.
Unfortunately, I have begun to lose faith in the constitution as a sufficient barricade to a determined ideologue.
Just last week, Attorney General Gonzales testified before Congress that the administration's furtive wiretapping had been done under the President's plenary powers to wage war. However, there is an interesting clause in the constitution that confers the power to declare war only on Congress. And Congress has taken no vote to declare war on Iraq or even on "terrorism".
Bush is not the only President to have skirted this particular clause of the constitution. In fact, Congress has declared no war since December 1941, yet we have been engaged militarily in Korea, Vietnam, Lebanon, and a host of African and central European countries. But at least we observed the niceities. Korea was called a "police action". Vietnam was arguably authorized by the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. And (except for that humid weekend in Granada) we were in other countries under U.N. sponsorship.
But I can remember no President before Bush who has claimed
officially to assume wartime powers when no war has been declared. It is a bald usurpation from Congress of the power to declare war.
Another constitutional threshold was crossed with the White House Office of Faith-Based Initiatives. Flouting if not the narrow language of the constiution, then certainly the long lineage of court cases that have elucidated the dividing line, Mr. Bush put both the office of the President and the funds of all taxpayers behind the promotion of religion for political purposes.
Bush's zeal to launch a war against
someone early in his presidency -- without waiting for proof of offense, without securing U.N. support, without securing a legal declaration of war -- certainly had a lot to do with our perceptions about terrorist threats. But it also had a lot to do with giving him political aircover early in his presidency to advance some social agendas that were dear to his political base but lacked more widespread support.
Many political commentators have remarked how smoothly Bush assumed office on the heels of a contested vote count in which there were serious doubts that he really carried Florida in 2000 (where his brother was governor and the person who certified the vote was a staunch Republican who pushes a "Christian right" agenda) and that he really carried Ohio in 2004. They compared it to the public unrest in Mexico over a similarly-confused recent election and drew the lesson that the U.S. is an ultra-stable political society. However, I have wondered if Bush's precipitous rush into Iraq didn't have something to do with deflecting public and Congressional discussion about voting procedures in the U.S.
What is scariest to me about all this is not that Bush is doing it. Franlkin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, to name but two Democratic Presidents, were equally cynical and Machiavellian. What is scariest is that there have been so few challenges to it, either in Congress or the courts. (Perhaps it's no coincidence that all three of these Presidents were "wartime" Presidents and were driving aggressive social agendas: the New Deal, the War on Poverty, and the Moral Crusade. Has war somehow sneaked up on us as something a President views as necessary for driving an aggressive domestic agenda?)
I think that Bush's presidency will be one of the most studied by future students of U.S. history . . . not because it was successful, but because it pushed the edge on so many points relating to our system of checks and balances.