The imperial presidency: Republicans just pulled off their longest con

[marmar]

The imperial presidency: Republicans just pulled off their longest con
Supreme Court weaponizes the presidency knowing what criminals like Richard Nixon and Donald Trump are capable of

By HEATHER DIGBY PARTON
Columnist
PUBLISHED JULY 3, 2024 9:00AM (EDT)


(Salon) In 1973 the Senate Watergate Committee uncovered a plan that had been hatched three years earlier by a man named Tom Charles Huston, a White House liaison to the Interagency Committee on Intelligence (ICI), a group chaired by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to monitor "left wing radicals." The Huston Plan, as it was known, laid out detailed operations to burglarize the homes and conduct electronic surveillance of these co-called radicals and even detain anti-war protesters in camps to be created in western states. President Richard Nixon signed off on the plan only to rescind his approval a few days later under objections from Hoover himself.

....(snip)....

I bring this obscure bit of Watergate lore up because it was the Huston plan that precipitated a very important historical question posed to Nixon by David Frost in their interviews in 1977:

So, what in a sense you’re saying is that there are certain situations and the Huston plan or that part of it was one of them where the president can decide that it’s in the best interest of the nation or something and do something illegal.

Nixon infamously replied, "well, when the president does it … that means that it is not illegal."

....(snip)....

The Reagan administration set about evading and disarming them immediately and a whole generation of young legal Reagan revolutionaries adopted the view that Nixon was right and the presidency had been inappropriately emasculated. They pushed novel new legal concepts like the "unitary executive" theory which puts strong constraints on any congressional authority to grant independent authority to executive branch agencies.

Five members of the Supreme Court came up in that legal atmosphere. Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito were lawyers in the Reagan administration and Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh were in the George W. Bush administration. Justice Amy Coney Barrett didn't work directly for a president, and notably dissented in part of the majority opinion, but she did work on Bush v. Gore with Kavanaugh and Roberts. This was a fundamental belief among the elite legal minds of the conservative movement. ..................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2024/07/03/the-imperial-presidency-just-pulled-off-their-longest-con/

[Easterncedar]

1. Where was OUR long game?

Hah. We don’t have one; we react in the present, let things slide when times are good, fail to shore up our victories and set our hair on fire when we lose.

That’s me. My hair is ablaze and I’m in a panic.

[Progressive dog]

2. We are Democrats

We are not a cult.

[Passages]

3. Takeover by Charlie Savage

Hailed by liberals and conservatives alike for its revelation of an emerging threat to the checks and balances devised by our Founding Fathers, Takeover is a searing investigation into how a group of true believers, led by Dick Cheney, has seized vast powers for the presidency – and permanently altered the constitutional balance of American democracy.

Takeover unveils the machinations behind the headlines, explaining the links between warrantless wiretapping and recent Supreme Court nominees, between the unprecedented politicization of the Justice Department and the torture debate, between the White House’s use of “signing statements” and its efforts to impose greater control over JAG lawyers. For anyone who cares about America’s past, present, and future, Takeover is essential reading.
https://charliesavage.com/books/takeover-the-return-of-the-imperial-presidency-and-the-subversion-of-american-democracy/