Cheney’s Unlimited Power Doctrine
Matt Corley observes Dick Cheney outlining his view of presidential power:
On Fox News Sunday today, host Chris Wallace asked Vice President Cheney, “if the President, during war, decides to do something to protect the country, is it legal?” “I think as a general proposition, I’d say yes,” replied Cheney.
Obviously, everyone would like the president to take action to protect the country during war. Indeed, protecting the country is good even during time of peace. But Cheney’s view of this matter is inimical to the idea of liberal democracy. Suppose President Obama feels that John Boehner’s neo-Hooverite opposition to economic stimulus is endangering the economy and playing into al-Qaeda’s hands, so he decides to lock him up in Gitmo? That would be extreme, of course. But every President feels, completely sincerely, that his policies are necessary for the security of the nation. And thus, every President feels that his opponents are endangering the country. And in the past executive branch officials have repeatedly been tempted to abuse their authority in order to persecute political enemies. Woodrow Wilson did it, Richard Nixon did it, and to some extent so did all the presidents between them.
And it’s important to recall that Cheney doesn’t think that there needs to be a declared war or anything to bring these wartime powers online. The mere risk of terrorist attack — something that it’s hard to image ever entirely going away — is sufficient.
Underlying all of this is an odd conservative lack of faith in democracy. Cheney’s implicit theory is that the democracies prevailed in the Cold War — surely a time of greater external threat — despite our liberal political systems. In fact, the openness of liberal democracy was a major strength. Robust political competition, a free press, transparency in government, etc. helped ensure that policy errors would actually be corrected and that corrupt practices would be curbed. Cheney-style autocracy works fine as long as nobody is ever incompetent or corrupt, but that’s never. And it certainly doesn’t describe the Bush-Cheney administration.
33 Responses to “Cheney’s Unlimited Power Doctrine”
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December 21st, 2008 at 12:35 pm
Cheney is a douche. Nuff said.
December 21st, 2008 at 12:38 pm
Underlying all of this is an odd conservative lack of faith in democracy.
What’s odd about it? It would be odd in terms of what used to be thought of as ‘conservative’ in the American context, but i don’t see anything odd about it in terms of contemporary Movement Conservatism. These are the people who, after all, idolized Franco (for example). These are the people who, had they been in power in the 1930s, would have thought twice about the need to be implacably opposed to Nazism. ‘Bad’, yes. ‘Odd’, not so much.
December 21st, 2008 at 12:50 pm
Raise your hand if you quickly flashed to Nixon’s “if the president does it, it’s not illegal” line.
December 21st, 2008 at 12:53 pm
Cheney’s recent willingness to discuss “governing philosophy” should be welcomed. While most of us would strongly disagree with him, it is useful to see his beliefs clearly stated in his own words. Cheney (and the Right Wing generally) believe in Authority – The Executive Branch; The Church; The Corporation – over individual rights. Hopefully, Cheney will continue to be interviewed and offer more of his insights.
What will be almost as interesting is whether the main stream media (print, TV and talk radio) will discuss it in any depth. We can be certain it will be a major topic of conversation on the Internet and in the Academy.
December 21st, 2008 at 12:56 pm
Hand raised.
And Matt, yes, conservatives often felt our democracy made us vulnerable to authoritarian foes. Of course, I just think they hated the very notion of democracy, but that’s often how it came out. As they like to say, “The Constitution is not a suicide pact,” meaning, “Anything in the Constitution I think weak will be ignored.”
December 21st, 2008 at 3:39 pm
One of three things is true about Cheney:
1) He feels like the “invulnerable” bad guy near the end of a movie: the hero is in his clutches, and will soon be dead. Its time to explain everything, so the hero will know as he dies how fiendishly clever, and cleverly evil, the bad guy has been.
(Of course, the hero always escapes and vanquishes the villain.)
Which means the fix is in and Bush has already drawn up the pardons which he will sign on the way out the door.
2) Cheney is really totally pathological, and believes everything he says, and that everything he and the rest of that gang did was necessary and heroic.
Which means the fix is in and Bush has already drawn up the pardons which he will sign on the way out the door.
3) His heart condition is really, really bad, and he figures he’ll be in the ground before he can be prosecuted.
Which means the fix is in and Bush has already drawn up the pardons which he will sign on the way out the door.
I vote for all of them.
December 21st, 2008 at 3:53 pm
We live in the weirdest of times in the weirdest of worlds.
Over here, we have Dick Cheney saying the president can do whatever he wants in a time of war, and that war should be perpetual, or at least indefinite.
Over there, we have Dick Cheney’s political base trying to tie the president-elect to every scandal they can dream up with their addled, dim minds, even a scandal that the highly respected Republican AG on the case has signaled the president-elect has no more than a geographical connection to.
The only bright spot is that on Jan. 20, this twisted, sick and utterly evil fuck is shuttled off to an entirely too comfortable and hopefully completely powerless retirement, and then we’ll only have to live with his spawn. You would think that if all that religious nonsense about good and evil and the human soul and all were ven remotely true, Dick Cheney’s bad heart would just have spontaneously exploded at some point — or maybe all that pure, unadulterated evil and greed is the only thing that’s keeping him alive.
December 21st, 2008 at 4:51 pm
Cheney is pathological. How can there be no risk? BTW, has NORAD worked out that air defense thingy?
December 21st, 2008 at 6:42 pm
Cheney is misrepresenting the Republican position: if the president does it, and the president is a Republican, it’s right; if the president does it, and the president is a Democrat, it’s a scandal.
December 21st, 2008 at 6:47 pm
Disclaimer: I utterly detest Cheney.
That said, the full quote isn’t as outrageous as MY’s truncated snippet suggests. Cheney’s response was:
The idea that the executive branch has increased war powers is not that controversial. The idea that the executive branch has unlimited powers is extremely controversial, bordering on treasonous. Cheney doesn’t actually say where he is on that spectrum though – “general proposition” obviously isn’t a totally inclusive statement. And DTM should note that Cheney actually directly addressed his observation.
None of this makes Cheney any less vile, but I think it’s important to not distort.
December 21st, 2008 at 7:15 pm
I would love to waterboard John Boehner and the rest of those guys in Gitmo. Cheney too for that matter.
December 21st, 2008 at 9:08 pm
Nobody I know, self included, likes Cheney. But I welcome, as Wisconsin Reader said, a discussion of the various theories of executive power. Considering the petty and feckless nature of Congress recently, I’m not wild about the idea of Congressional power being expanded either. Maybe I’m a closet “small government” guy by default; I KNOW that’s true around tax time.
One of the comments in this thread alleges that conservatives are “anti-democracy”. I don’t buy that. Both parties try their best (and worst) to gain power and win elections via the democratic process. And when we don’t like the President or his/her party, we vote them a seat on the bench (if we are able to come up with a credible and electable candidate) and put in a substitute. That’s democracy, messy and slow and very imperfect in its execution, but I kind of like it.
Barack Obama WOULD do well to keep Mr. Biden on a short leash, in my opinion. He doesn’t scare me in the same way Cheney has, as I think he is a genuinely sincere and nice person. But he has a propensity for wandering off and getting tangled up in the underbrush, verbally and intellectually. I tremble at the thought of his becoming POTUS.
December 21st, 2008 at 9:37 pm
Cheney is comic in his distortions. The VP hasn’t increased its power an iota by Cheney’s declarations. Bush has relied on Cheney the man not the “Vice-President”. The office of the VP is still to break ties in the Senate and to wait for the Other Guy to croak. Cheney’s bellicosity hasn’t changed that. He twisted arms at the CIA because Bush wanted an unscrupulous shit to twist arms not because the VP suddenly had “Twists arms at the CIA” added to its powers.
Bush similarly acted with impunity because the Republicans were shits and cowards still smarting from their inability to remove Bill Clinton, not because anyone believed that the president was above the law. The president wasn’t above the law: Bush was above the law because there were enough hoodlums in Congress to make bringing him to justice problematic.
December 22nd, 2008 at 5:51 pm
Cheney is saying that he would have no principled objection were Biden to order him, Rumsfeld, Rove, and the whole lying crew packed off to Gitmo, permanently. Let’s take him at his word.
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