What is the motivation behind Bush’s incessant attempts to expand the powers of the Executive branch?  Dahlia Lithwick at Slate has a concise explanation.

Willing to give the benefit of the doubt, I once believed the common thread here was presidential blindness—an extreme executive-branch myopia that leads the president to believe that these futile little measures are somehow integral to combating terrorism. That this is some piece of self-delusion that precludes Bush and his advisers from recognizing that Padilla is just a chump and Guantanamo merely a holding pen for a jumble of innocent and half-guilty wretches.

But it has finally become clear that the goal of these foolish efforts isn’t really to win the war against terrorism; indeed, nothing about Padilla, Guantanamo, or signing statements moves the country an inch closer to eradicating terror. The object is a larger one, and the original overarching goal of this administration: expanding executive power, for its own sake.

Read the rest for yourself.

While on the topic there are two related news items today.  First, the Bush administration actually ceded a bit of ground and will funnel all domestic surveillance requests through the FISA court.  Second, the Bush administration is taking advantage of an “obscure” provision of the so called Patriot Act to appoint U.S. Attorneys without Senate confirmation.

My view is the classic civil liberty view: whether or not you like Bush he is establishing precedents that may be used by all Presidents who follow him.  That person could be Hillary Clinton, Dick Cheney, Joe Biden, Tom Tancredo, etc.  We should always err on the side of minimizing government power for that reason.

Related content:

This entry was posted by Brian on Wednesday, January 17th, 2007 at 10:40 pm and is filed under Government. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Please note the copyright policy.