“It’s kind of ironic you have Boyden [Gray] and me here because when we were with the executive branch, we were probably the principal proponents of executive power under President Reagan and then President George H. W. Bush,” Mr. Meese said, quickly adding that the presidential prerogatives they sought to protect, unlike Mr. Obama’s, were valid.This was at a conservative symposium on “the unprecedented expansion of executive power during the past three years.” The "adding quickly..." clause is lovely. Not only does the "unlike Mr. Obama's" get no rejoinder from the Times (such as some discussion of what makes his use different), but one can almost hear Meese losing the crowd, prompting him to affirm what everybody there already knows: that it's Obama that has inaugurated the imperial presidency, and that the same actions done by conservatives were obviously constitutional because of
I do not much care for the aggressive use of presidential prerogatives, and I do tend to side with the Jeffersonian persuasion that these are anti-republican vestiges of monarchy. But then again, Jefferson purchased Louisiana, and I am willing to accommodate that within a more dynamic understanding of separated branches contesting over powers than a more static constitutionalism might allow.
The problem is less that the president is willing, than that Congress as an institution has not been effective in balancing or checking. It is, possibly, one of the few advantages of GOP control of the House that they might actually be trying to do so now. That this involves them in absurd hypocrisy just makes an appropriate constitutional role more entertaining.
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