the golden rule of presidenial power

Thanks to the power hungry Ford Administration veterans like Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld, along with the Al Qaeda attacks on 9/11, the hotest area of constitutional law these days in executive authority.

Folks like Bill Kristol and John Yoo are arguing that the president has the authority to go above the law and the constitution when there is a threat to national security. Besides the fact that this is utter lies, I would bet any amount of money that had Gore won the recount, and a president Gore done what Bush did with the NSA, these same folks would be screaming bloody murder.

My golden rule is this, if it is something you would grant Richard Nixon/Ronald Reagan/GW Bush to do, it has to also be something you would grant Bill Clinton/Al Gore/John Kerry to do. For example, I am fine with all of their fingers on the button, but I am not cool with all of them locking people up without charges or access to lawyers. Or spying on Americans in the US without a warrant.

First Bush compared himself to Churchill and FDR, but now he is trying to compare himself to the extraconstitutional actions of Lincoln, who ignored supreme court decisions he didn't like and suspended habeas corpus. Not surprisingly, neither action is viewed today as legal and we only don't talk about it so much because he won the civil war and freed slaves.

During the War of 1812, the president didn't have the powers that our does now. And then we were actually being invaded. Washington, DC was aflame. And Lincoln was at war with the Southern states. Bush is at war with an extreme religious ideology that is transnational and decentralized. The Al Qaeda of 2001 is gone, now we have a Hydra-headed organization whose primary goal is to kill Americans, especially American soldiers in Iraq.

Destorying it will take creativity, cunning, and people able to infiltrate parts of the organization; data mining Arabs and extreme left groups isn't the ticket.