The book, Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State, apparently makes the case that the persistence of international crisis (mostly the Cold War) has allowed the modern presidents (since FDR) to centralize massive power within the Oval Office--apparently far greater power than even imagined by Alexander Hamilton, the Godfather of the strong presidency (if you believe revisionist history). I have a great deal to say in a critique, but I would prefer to read the book before I do (however I would love to hear from you if you have read the book and what you think about the argument).
What burns me is the things--the important things--that this reviewer, Jurek Martin, gets wrong. There are the minor things--for instance, Martin notes that the Pentagon Papers were "...published only after the Supreme Court so ordered." That isn't true. The Papers had already begun running in the "Washington Post" and the "New York Times" before the Nixon administration asked for the injunction. Nixon was delighted at how the Papers dimmed the light on Camelot, and was persuaded by Kissinger to put a halt to them because of their damage to elite opinion.
No, what gets me is Martin's characterization of the unitary executive and the signing statement. He writes of the unitary executive:
But the organic growth of the national security state needed theoreticians and they comprise Wills’s large Hall of Infamy. It was the (ironically conservative) Reagan justice department, under attorney-general Edwin Meese, that developed the theory of the “unitary executive” – which basically says that the law is anything that the president says it is.
First, why is support for the theory antithetical to conservatives? Why "ironical"? Second, more to the point, is the definition of the unitary executive--"which basically says that the law is anything that the president says it is." Where in the literature do any scholars, including myself, define the unitary executive this way? As I have noted elsewhere, there are three tenets to the unitary executive: 1) the executive power belongs to the president and the president alone; 2) that the president has an independent right to interpret the Constitution and to determine what actions need be taken in the face of laws that he considers to be unconstitutional; and 3) as the only nationally elected official in the United States, he has a constitutional obligation, via the "Take Care" clause of Article II, to make sure that the laws are faithfully executed. This means that the president has a right to know, if not influence, how inferior executive branch officers behave--how they enforce the law, who they communicate with outside the Executive Branch, etc. Now since the unitary executive theory first came to life, those three tenets have been in place. What in those three tenets suggest that the president may claim the law means what he feels it means? What Martin knows about the unitary executive apparently has come from blog postings.
Then he argues that the unitary executive has "produced a welter of 'signing statements' in which a president says he can disregard, for whatever reason, any section of a duly passed congressional bill he has just, er, signed." First, the signing statement, in all forms, preceded the birth of the unitary executive. Granted, they don't start becoming significant until the Reagan administration, but even so, the unitary executive--as a formal theory--didn't debut until after Reagan left office. So while the two have a lot in common, one thing it doesn't have in common is cause and effect. And then, just like his definition of the unitary executive, his definition of the signing statement is equally as bad--the president can disregard, "for whatever reason"?? I wish Martin would find for me any signing statement--even the more egregious Bush signing statements, that say: "I refuse to enforce Section 111 just because." Then finally Martin says that "Bush the Younger" issued "more then (sic) 1,400 such reservations..." He may have gotten this number from Wills, at which case I am interested in his citation. But 1,400? By my counting, Bush issued less than 1,200. Where the extra 200+ came from is beyond me.
But this is the "Financial Times", which has a readership considerably higher than this blog posting or my research. I am obligated to be precise and accurate, why aren't they?
