Another Notch in the Authoritarian Belt

THE FIFTH COLUMNIST by P.M. Carpenter

Meanwhile, back at The Little Shop of Horrors, 1600 Pennsylvania Ave...

Meanwhile, back at The Little Shop of Horrors, 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, our presidentially stuck constrictionist on Saturday "vetoed a bill that would have explicitly prohibited the [C.I.A.] from using interrogation methods like waterboarding," otherwise known as "enhanced interrogation techniques," and yet otherwise known as torture.

Never mind that such gruesome techniques are already "prohibited by the military and law enforcement agencies," and that interrogation experts within those agencies have long since pronounced such inhumane methods "unnecessary or counterproductive."

And never mind the president's argument, as articulated Saturday in his veto-trumpeting radio address, that "Because the danger remains, we need to ensure our intelligence officials have all the tools they need to stop the terrorists" -- including internationally illegal and immoral ones, as redefined and single-handedly certified by American pseudo-law and pseudo-morality.

And never mind, as well, the president's other "danger"-battling techniques, such as monstrously recreating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or establishing basic-rights-denying military tribunals or rendering hapless suspects into secret prisons.

For they're interchangeable, essentially meaningless in their particulars. What they collectively denote, rather, is a much larger step on Mr. Bush's path to a permanently uncontested imperial presidency -- a term reworked by busy little Orwellians as a "unitary executive."

The fashioner of the original and more precise phraseology, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., for years watched in horror the malignant growth of presidential power. And he did so with no small amount of embarrassment, for he had once been a presidential advisor who touted the merits of presidential reassertion.

But it was Richard Nixon and his anticonstitutional crimes -- played out in Bush-like legalistic language -- who had something of a reconversion effect on Schlesinger (not to mention that suddenly it was Schlesinger's political opponents who were doing the touting).

So by the 1970s the academic historian was frantically ringing the warning bell of Nixonian imperialism, focusing much of his enmity on a rather recent but almost instantly enshrined presidential prerogative: "This supposed right, born in response to the irresponsible [congressional] requisitions of Joe McCarthy, received in 1957 the name of 'executive privilege' and thereafter acquired with mysterious rapidity the status of ancient and hallowed constitutional doctrine."

Nixon was just the beginning -- the purveyor of a White House training ground in which modern practitioners, such as Dick Cheney, earned their bones in learning the rudiments of authoritarianism. And they have now added to their list of executive prerogatives -- "rights" -- such unconscionable acts as torture.

Yet this "supposed right" to torture is but a tool itself in the service of much greater goals (greater in quantity, not quality): the rapid and permanent expansion of presidential power, for sure; but also, and even more insidiously, the recasting of constitutional doctrine.

Showing his utter and deliberate ignorance of our constitutional foundations, the president Saturday said he has "no higher responsibility than stopping terrorist attacks." The not-so subtle implication was that if stopping terrorist attacks means shelving the U.S. Constitution, then so be it. It's his job -- and it's perfectly permissible to defy the document whose integrity guarantees his right to trash it. Try sorting that one out.

As the story's reporter accurately put it, "At the core of the administration’s position is a conviction that the executive branch must have unfettered freedom when it comes to prosecuting war." But it was, of course, our freedom, our liberty that was once the highest and most hallowed of constitutional goals.

This conceptual doctrine, however, merely frustrates and befuddles Bush in his absolutely certain pursuit of "unfettered" power, as would the jurist Learned Hand's famous formulation of 1944: "The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right."

My, how yesterday in White House circles is that profound truth today.

Hand's quotation went on: "the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women."

I think we pretty well understand Mr. Bush's mind by now. And it will be Congress' job in 2009 to undo the immense damage his has done; as Congress uses, one hopes, another rather important anatomical part of its own, missing in action since 2002.

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THE FIFTH COLUMNIST by P.M. Carpenter