The Impotence of Obama's Power

Some of you may have been asking, if you keep up with current events, WTF is George W. Bush still doing in the White House? A valid question, to be sure. He should not still be there! (EDIT: I was recently told he is actually no longer residing at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., and apparently hasn't been for some months now. Additionally, and even more embarrassingly for me, he isn't even making policy decisions anymore. Fooled me!) Anyways, here is an article from the New York Review of Books about the inability of a modern US president to function in a way he might see fit due to the longtime accumulation of laws and responsibilities, both legal and illegal, that have increasingly factored into and distorted what exactly it means to be Commander in Chief of this once great country. Excerpts below, as well as a link to the full article. Enjoy, guys!

"But the momentum of accumulating powers in the executive is not easily reversed, checked, or even slowed. It was not created by the Bush administration. The whole history of America since World War II caused an inertial transfer of power toward the executive branch. The monopoly on use of nuclear weaponry, the cult of the commander in chief, the worldwide network of military bases to maintain nuclear alert and supremacy, the secret intelligence agencies, the entire national security state, the classification and clearance systems, the expansion of state secrets, the withholding of evidence and information, the permanent emergency that has melded World War II with the cold war and the cold war with the "war on terror"—all these make a vast and intricate structure that may not yield to effort at dismantling it. Sixty-eight straight years of war emergency powers (1941–2009) have made the abnormal normal, and constitutional diminishment the settled order.

"The truth of this was borne out in the early days of Barack Obama's presidency. At his confirmation hearing to be head of the CIA, Leon Panetta said that "extraordinary rendition"—the practice of sending prisoners to foreign countries—was a tool he meant to retain.^[1] Obama's nominee for solicitor general, Elena Kagan, told Congress that she agreed with John Yoo's claim that a terrorist captured anywhere should be subject to "battlefield law."^[2] On the first opportunity to abort trial proceedings by invoking "state secrets"—the policy based on the faulty Reynolds case—Obama's attorney gen- eral, Eric Holder, did so.^[3] Obama refused to release photographs of "enhanced interrogation." The CIA had earlier (illegally) destroyed ninety-two videotapes of such interrogations—and Obama refused to release documents describing the tapes."

"On January 25, 2002, White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales signed a memo written by David Addington that called the Geneva Conventions "quaint" and "obsolete." Perhaps, in the nuclear era, the Constitution has become quaint and obsolete. Few people even consider anymore Madison's lapidary pronouncement, "In republican government the legislative authority necessarily predominates." Instead, we are all, as citizens, asked to salute our commander in chief. Any president, wanting leverage to accomplish his goals, must find it hard to give up the aura of war chief, the mystery and majesty that have accrued to him with control of the Bomb, the awesome proximity to the Football, to the Button."

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23110