Absolute Power

Over at TPM-Cafe, Anne-Marie Slaughter writes the following comments about Bush's claim to absolute power and Alito's apparent support of it:

The President claims nevertheless that his Commander-in-Chief power is absolute, because the very security of the nation is at stake. George Washington didn't make that argument in the Revolution; Franklyn Roosevelt didn't make that argument after Pearl Harbor; Harry Truman tried to make that argument during the Korean War when he tried to nationalize the steel mills and got shot down by the Supreme Court. Yet today George W. Bush is advancing this argument in a "war" that his own Pentagon tried to recast as the "global struggle versus violent extremism (remember G-Save?) and that the Administration itself admits is likely to last decades and in which even the definition of victory is elusive, much less the fact. Equally important, the public has no independent means of assessing the validity and magnitude of any asserted threat.

In such a circumstance, the President's continued assertion of his commander-in-chief power is in fact a blank check. The scope of and limits on that power is central issue for all of us - in the torture debate, the debate over domestic spying, the debate over the rights of both American and non-American detainees to challenge the fact and circumstances of their detention, and the more general debate about the proper trade-off between civil liberties and increased security. But for small "d" democrats - all Americans who care about the health of our democracy - we must also be willing to fight the cancer of fear that is eating away at our polity and our values. We have to tackle this issue head-on and argue that an "absolute presidency" is worse even than 9/11 itself or any future attack. Our forefathers and our veterans and our soldiers today around the world have fought and are fighting for what Captain Ian Fishback, the soldier who had to go all the way to John McCain to get his complaints about interrogation abuses listened to, calls: Captain Ian Fishback, the soldier who had to go all the way to McCain to get his concerns about torture calls "the idea that is America."

I particularly endorse her point that, "an 'absolute presidency' is worse even than 9/11 itself or any future attack."