Is American Liberty Dying?

American liberty is dying. For years the process has been slow strangulation, as successive Congresses and presidents, irrespective of party, expanded government power. True, Republicans usually tightened the garrote a bit less quickly. But the end point was the same: the expansive, expensive welfare-warfare state.

Alas, both parties have combined to give the growth of government authority a dangerous twist: the aggrandizement of the executive. This has been a constant in wartime: Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt all used the alleged necessity of war to justify enormous expansion of not just their congressionally enacted powers, but also their supposed unilateral authority. Last century Democratic presidents led the way in exalting the executive, but now the Republican Party, while endlessly blathering on about individual liberty and limited government, is claiming that the president is a democratically-elected king.

The Republican worship of unilateral executive power has reached its apotheosis in the Bush administration. Taken seriously, President George W. Bush claims to have the right to ignore the Constitution at home for as long as we are at war – which means forever, since the "war on terrorism" has no obvious endpoint and the battlefield is the entire world, including the United States. Admittedly, President Bush so far has not fully exercised these extraordinary powers, which logically include the authority to disband the Supreme Court and prorogue Congress for interfering with his attempt to protect America from terrorism. But if the president can designate an American citizen arrested in America as an enemy combatant to be held incommunicado by the military without access to legal counsel for years, then is there anything the president cannot do?

Read further here referring to the book The Cult of the Presidency: America's Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power.