Reporter Documents Return of Imperial Presidency
Boston Globe reporter Charlie Savage won a Pulitzer Prize for a series of articles describing how President Bush used the little known device of "signing statements" to negate legislation limiting presidential authority. Now, in Takeover -- The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy, he has expanded his thesis into a book.
Following Watergate and the Vietnam War, which resulted in the weakening of the imperial presidency, Savage writes, a small group of Republican loyalists with Dick Cheney among them began planning ways to restore presidential power. Under their game plan, "Congress would be defanged, and the commander-in-chief would be able to assert a unilateral dominance both home and abroad." Savage's book relates the saga of "a hidden agenda three decades in the making, laying out how a group of true believers set out to establish monarchical executive powers that, in the words of one conservative critic, 'will lie around like a loaded weapon' ready to be picked up by any future president."
Conservative columnist George Will shares Savage's worries about the presidency: "With meticulous reporting and lucid explanations of audacious theories invented to justify novel presidential powers, Savage identifies a growing, and dangerous, constitutional imbalance."
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