The Cheney ProjectWe’d be remiss if we didn’t link over to fellow muckraker Charlie Savage’s stay at TPMCafe this week to discuss his new book Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy.
It’s long been apparent that the administration has sought to expand executive power whenever possible. But Savage’s book documents the extent to which this was a conscious and controlling priority, especially for Dick Cheney — so much so that Savage calls it “The Cheney Project.” Go check it out.
A particularly telling excerpt from the book is below.
From the chapter titled “The Agenda”:
A former senior member of the administration legal team who did not want to be identified by name recalled a pervasive post-9/11 sense of masculine bravado and one-upmanship when it came to executive power. A “closed group of like-minded people” were almost in competition with one another, he said, to see who could offer the farthest-reaching claims of what a president could do. In contrast, those government lawyers who were perceived as less passionate about presidential power were derided as “soft” and were often simply cut out of the process. “The lawyers for the administration felt a tremendous amount of time pressure and there was a lot of secrecy,” the former official said. “These things were being done in small groups. There was a great deal of suspicion of the people who normally act as a check inside the executive branch, such as the State Department, which had the reputation of being less aggressive on executive power. This process of faster, smaller groups fed on itself and built a dynamic of trying to show who was tougher on executive power.”