After the Imperial Presidency - NYTimes.com

Among the many things we worry about as Obama forms his cabinet is what he plans to do with all the presidential power he will inherit from Bush. I believe that the idea of a unitary executive, a president king, needs to be diminished in order for the Federal government to function. The New York times has a good article on this topic. Here's an excerpt from that article, After the Imperial Presidency:

For those concerned about the expansion of presidential power, Barack Obama’s answers to the Boston Globe’s 2007 questionnaire were encouraging. Among other things, he said the president can’t conduct surveillance without warrants or detain United States citizens indefinitely as unlawful enemy combatants. He also said that it’s illegal for the president to ignore international treaties like the Geneva Conventions and that if Congress prohibits a specific interrogation technique by law, the president cannot employ it. “The president is not above the law,” Obama said.

It would be a mistake, though, to view presidential power as a left-right issue. Historically, Democratic presidents have been no less eager than their Republican counterparts to leverage the authority of their office. Recall that the last Democrat to occupy the White House, Bill Clinton, launched air strikes on Kosovo in a war against Yugoslavia without Congressional authorization and liberally invoked executive privilege during the various investigations into his private life and financial dealings.

History has shown that where you stand on executive authority is largely a matter of where you sit. Before his election, Abraham Lincoln criticized President James Polk for provoking the Mexican War; as president, Lincoln unilaterally suspended habeas corpus and ordered a blockade of the ports of rebel states. As a senator, Richard Nixon — of all people — criticized President Truman’s frequent invocations of executive privilege.

Bruce Fein, a Justice Department lawyer in the Reagan administration who is now a critic of presidential power, told me a few weeks ago that he expects the next president to “take everything Bush has given him and wield it with even greater confidence because Congress has given him a safe harbor to do so with impunity.” This may be overstating the point, but it’s worth keeping in mind that in the final year of Bush’s presidency — while facing a Democratic Congress and historically low approval ratings — he was able to push through a federal bailout bill that vested almost complete control over the economy in the Treasury secretary (who reports to the president), not to mention a major rewriting of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that will make it easier for the White House to spy on American citizens.

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