"...AMY GOODMAN: Charlie Savage is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter from
the Boston Globe, has written extensively about President Bush's
signing statements and other White House efforts to expand executive
branch secrecy and unchecked power. Warrantless wiretapping is one
part of this story. Charlie Savage has just published a book charting
the means the Bush administration devised to circumvent laws and
expand presidential authority. It's called Takeover: The Return of the
Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy. Joining
us now in our firehouse studio, Charlie Savage. Welcome.
CHARLIE SAVAGE: Thanks for having me on.
AMY GOODMAN: Charlie, you begin in a very dramatic way on September
11, 2001. Tell us about what Dick Cheney was doing.
CHARLIE SAVAGE: That's right. Well, I began with this sort of unusual
moment in the midst of the 9/11 attacks, in which the military
believed that at least one more plane is still in the air and
hijacked, and they asked Dick Cheney in the bunker beneath the White
House whether they should shoot this plane down. And Cheney gives them
authority to shoot down United 93, as it were. Now, it turns out that
that was a moot point, because United 93 had already crashed amid the
passenger uprising. They were looking at an image of where it would be
if it were still in the air.
But this shoot-down order became the subject of an intense dispute
with the 9/11 Commission, because Cheney later told the commission,
and Bush agreed with him, that Bush had given Cheney prior authority
as the commander-in-chief, who actually commands the military to take
such an extraordinary step. But the 9/11 Commission looked at all the
notes of the people aboard Air Force One and in the bunker, and they
looked at all the switchboard logs from the bunker and the military of
communications going in and out, and they found no evidence, no
documentary evidence that that call existed.
And so, I use that moment to open this book, Takeover, because it's a
very vivid illustration of, first of all, the climate, you know, the
atmosphere of 9/11, which really helped this push to concentrate more
power in the White House, but also Cheney taking command inside the
administration, especially in the national security context, Bush
acquiescing to Cheney's point of view, and then their effort -- their
administration's effort to control the flow of information about kind
of what's happening behind the closed doors at the executive branch.
AMY GOODMAN: And when they had the 9/11 Commission hearing meeting,
the insistence by Cheney and Bush that it not be sworn testimony, that
Cheney be sitting physically directly next to President Bush, and that
there be no recording of their statements made about this
conversation, about whether Bush had given the actual command or
whether it was Cheney.
CHARLIE SAVAGE: That's right. You know, and, of course, it is a moot
point. The planes were down. It doesn't really matter that much, but
it's a vivid way of illustrating Cheney's role in the administration,
and therefore getting into the topic of what Cheney used that
influence to do. And one of the most important things and one of the
most successfully implemented policies of this administration, one
that they never talk about and that I think has received scant
attention, just depending on how sweeping it is and how successfully
they pulled it off, was that he had wanted, when they arrived in
office long before 9/11, to use that time in office to reshape
American democracy by concentrating more power in the White House, by
expanding presidential power, by throwing off checks and balances.
This was an agenda that he had with him, dating back thirty years to
his time in the White House as chief of staff to Gerald Ford in that
period after Watergate and Vietnam, when Congress was re-imposing some
checks and balances on the imperial presidency that had grown up
during the early Cold War. And Cheney would spend the next thirty
years trying to throw that off. Finally, as vice president, the most
experienced vice president in history dealing with one of the least
experienced presidents in history, he was in a position to shape this
administration's practices and tactics as it went forward, now pushing
into eight years, in order to take actions and set precedents across a
huge range of issues and ways that were going to leave the presidency
much stronger than it was when they arrived.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And specifically the use of the signing statements,
which, of course, was the subject of much of your reporting -- how did
the signing statements fit into this overall policy?
CHARLIE SAVAGE: The signing statements are one tactic among many, but
it's an illustration of how much more aggressive this administration
has been than any that came before and how it's kind of thrown off
sort of unofficial constraints, practices of restraint. A signing
statement is an official legal document the President issues on the
day he signs a bill into law. It consists of instructions to his
subordinates in the executive branch about how they are to implement
the new laws created by a bill. And it becomes controversial when the
President says, "You will interpret Section 103 as being
unconstitutional, because I alone have said it's unconstitutional, and
you do what I tell you. And if it's unconstitutional, that means you
don't need to enforce it." And where that becomes very controversial
is when Section 103 is a check or a balance on the President's own
power, because then not enforcing that law means not having to obey
that law.
Now, previous presidents have occasionally used signing statements
like this, but President Bush has challenged more laws than all
previous presidents in American history combined, using signing
statements, a dramatic escalation of this tactic, in what the American
Bar Association has said is evolving into kind of a backdoor override-
proof line-item veto power, which can really prevent Congress from
ever again imposing any new checks on presidential power. It's just
but -- it's an extraordinary thing, an extraordinary development in
our constitutional law, and yet it's just one of many, many different
tactics the administration has used to concentrate more unchecked
power in the White House.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about wiretapping, the controversy now, the
frustration that people have with the Democrats, supposedly the
opposition party, going along with the Republicans.
CHARLIE SAVAGE: Well, the background is that after 9/11, as we all
know now, Bush gave the military the authority to wiretap phone calls
without warrants, in defiance of a 1978 law that required warrants for
that situation. And he used a very aggressive legal theory about the
President's powers as commander-in-chief to bypass laws at his own
discretion. Because that program was only legal if that theory were
true, that meant that the fact that they did this set a precedent that
says that theory is true, and future presidents will be able to cite
that precedent when they want to evade any other law that restricts
their own authority.
So now, going forward, one of the ways this agenda has been able to be
so successfully implemented was that there was no resistance from
Congress. At the very moment there was this stronger push coming out
of the Vice President's office to expand the presidential power as an
end to itself in any way possible, because of one-party rule for six
years and because of the atmosphere of crisis after 9/11, there was no
push back. And that's how the ball was moved so far down the field.
And one of the things that's been very interesting about the last year
is now we have split control of government again, and so the question
was, how is that going to change things? And what we've seen from the
Protect America Act in August and the dynamic going forward is that
even with split control of government, the dynamic is still there.
Congress is just as it was for the first twenty or thirty years of the
Cold War, when the original imperial presidency was growing under
presidents of both parties, by the way. Congress is again unwilling to
push back against the White House's assertion that it needs ever more
authority, and checks and balances will result in bloodshed. And so, I
think, going forward, that you can see that this dynamic is going to
be with us. And, of course, two years from now, we may have one-party
control of government again, the other party, but that will just sort
of hurl us further down this path, I think.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And this issue of the President seeking to protect
those in the corporate world who go along with his policies -- well,
first of all, obviously, there was the retroactive immunity to the
airline companies after 9/11 for their failure to act to provide a
kind of security on their planes, giving them immunity from any
possible lawsuits, and now this effort by the administration to try to
provide retroactive immunity to the telecom companies that went along
with his surveillance program.
CHARLIE SAVAGE: Well, and what this is, is because Congress has
demonstrated that it's really not going to do anything about the basic
fact that the President asserted he could bypass a law and then he
acted on that assertion, and, you know, that established he can do
that, or whoever else is president at any given moment from now on can
do that, that the one sort of last place where critics of this sort of
extraordinary development could still have some traction was the
lawsuit against the companies, which had also evidently broken privacy
laws by going along with this. So, by seeking retroactive immunity,
it's sort of the last place closing off the possibility of
accountability.
And accountability for how people use their power is one of the great
ways in which the administration has successfully expanded their own
powers, as well. For example, by dramatically expanding secrecy
surrounding the executive branch in all kinds of ways, going after
open government laws, expanding executive privilege, expanding the use
of the state secret privilege to get rid of lawsuits in courts, and on
and on and on, what they've done is they've made the executive branch
much more of a black box so that outsiders, whether Congress, the
courts or just voters, don't know what officials are doing with these
powers at the very moment that the powers are being dramatically
increased, and that means that the officials who have that power,
whoever they are at any given moment, are much freer to do whatever
they want with them..."
Full article->
