And the right-wing's imperial Presidency fantasy is once again alive and kicking:
Not inaccurately, the Bush presidency has been called imperial ... The evidence? Its "preemptive" and "preventive" military policy, its contentions that it can go to war regardless of whether Congress approves, its policies calling for American world domination, and its unprecedented blending of national security policy and domestic law enforcement. In my view, these policies and positions not only easily establish the Bush presidency as imperial, they also rank it beyond anything in the annals of the modern American presidency. This may be the most imperial Presidency our history has yet seen. ...Indeed, five cases are currently awaiting review by the Court with a sixth that the Court refused to hear. All but one of these cases involve the civil rights (or lack thereof) of people detained by the government, with the other case being Cheney v. Judicial Watch and Sierra Club. This last case involves the "right" of Vice President Dick Cheney to refuse to turn over documents from the Energy Task Force held in March, 2001.The fact that five cases currently before the Supreme Court address the question of presidential powers -- and whether or not the Bush presidency has exceeded them -- speaks for itself. Bush has had almost twice as many such cases before the Court as Nixon had, in half the time.
Dean himself offers no analyses on these cases, but clearly, the Cheney case could prove to be the most threatening to the administration itself. The detainee cases, if lost by the administration, would simply invovle the implementation of procedural changes regarding its detention policies. The Cheney case however is more similar to the Watergate tapes case in that if lost it would provide an open window into the secret workings of the administration. The damage of course would then depend on what was then viewed through that window, and this could be disasterous. We would almost certainly see that the vice president was dividing up the spoils of an Iraq war a full six months before 9/11. Worse still, we might see that Cheney was also doing this for Afghanistan, something my research shows to be a high probability. If this were to prove to be the case, the only question left then would be whom to impeach.
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