- George W. Bush has quipped several times during his political
career that it would be so much easier to govern in a dictatorship. Apparently
he never told his vice president that this was a joke.
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- Virtually from the time he chose himself to be Mr. Bush's
running mate in 2000, Dick Cheney has spearheaded an extraordinary expansion
of the powers of the presidency - from writing energy policy behind closed
doors with oil executives to abrogating longstanding treaties and using
the 9/11 attacks as a pretext to invade Iraq, scrap the Geneva Conventions
and spy on American citizens.
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- It was a chance Mr. Cheney seems to have been dreaming
about for decades. Most Americans looked at wrenching events like the Vietnam
War, the Watergate scandal and the Iran-contra debacle and worried that
the presidency had become too powerful, secretive and dismissive. Mr. Cheney
looked at the same events and fretted that the presidency was not powerful
enough, and too vulnerable to inspection and calls for accountability.
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- The president "needs to have his constitutional
powers unimpaired, if you will, in terms of the conduct of national security
policy," Mr. Cheney said this week as he tried to stifle the outcry
over a domestic spying program that Mr. Bush authorized after the 9/11
attacks.
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- Before 9/11, Mr. Cheney was trying to undermine the institutional
and legal structure of multilateral foreign policy: he championed the abrogation
of the Antiballistic Missile Treaty with Moscow in order to build an antimissile
shield that doesn't work but makes military contactors rich. Early in his
tenure, Mr. Cheney, who quit as chief executive of Halliburton to run with
Mr. Bush in 2000, gathered his energy industry cronies at secret meetings
in Washington to rewrite energy policy to their specifications. Mr. Cheney
offered the usual excuses about the need to get candid advice on important
matters, and the courts, sadly, bought it. But the task force was not an
exercise in diverse views. Mr. Cheney gathered people who agreed with him,
and allowed them to write national policy for an industry in which he had
recently amassed a fortune.
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- The effort to expand presidential power accelerated after
9/11, taking advantage of a national consensus that the president should
have additional powers to use judiciously against terrorists.
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- Mr. Cheney started agitating for an attack on Iraq immediately,
pushing the intelligence community to come up with evidence about a link
between Iraq and Al Qaeda that never existed. His team was central to writing
the legal briefs justifying the abuse and torture of prisoners, the idea
that the president can designate people to be "unlawful enemy combatants"
and detain them indefinitely, and a secret program allowing the National
Security Agency to eavesdrop on American citizens without warrants. And
when Senator John McCain introduced a measure to reinstate the rule of
law at American military prisons, Mr. Cheney not only led the effort to
stop the amendment, but also tried to revise it to actually legalize torture
at C.I.A. prisons.
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- There are finally signs that the democratic system is
trying to rein in the imperial presidency. Republicans in the Senate and
House forced Mr. Bush to back the McCain amendment, and Mr. Cheney's plan
to legalize torture by intelligence agents was rebuffed. Congress also
agreed to extend the Patriot Act for five weeks rather than doing the administration's
bidding and rushing to make it permanent.
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