An equal and opposite overreaction.

• Author: Glastris, Paul
• Position: Editor's Note - Politics and society

For every abusive action in Washington, there is an equal and opposite overreaction. The lies of Vietnam led to an excessive distrust of the military. Watergate eventually created a mentality in Washington that any conceivable charge of presidential misconduct deserves an independent counsel investigation, which in turn gave us the farcical Clinton impeachment. Exposure of CIA and FBI misconduct (trying to kill Castro with exploding cigars; subverting peaceful domestic political groups) led to those agencies becoming extraordinarily risk-averse, to the point that they could not rouse themselves to act on evidence of domestic al-Qaeda activities they had on hand in the months prior to 9/11.

We may now be entering a similar period of overreaction. Almost every week brings fresh revelations of abuse of presidential power by the Bush administration. The latest news, broken by the New York Times, is that in 2005, the Justice Department, having supposedly repudiated the infamous "torture" memo, issued at least two more memos authorizing even more extreme practices, without informing key Democrats in Congress. This White House truly is without precedent. Past presidents who took extraconstitutional actions in time of war, like Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, did so openly and claimed those powers only as emergency measures. Bush, by contrast, has acted largely in secret and has claimed these powers as inherent to the presidency. Historically, presidential authority, once it expands, seldom contracts. So there's a real danger that Bush's successor, whoever it is, will pocket the enhanced power Bush has asserted. Indeed, as Rachel Morris notes in this month's cover story, at least one candidate, Rudy Giuliani, will likely seek more (see "Rudy Awakening," p. 28).

But there's also the opposite risk: that, because the Bush administration has stepped so far outside legal bounds, future presidents will feel they must dwell too far inside legal bounds. Such behavior may please some constitutional scholars and newspaper editorial boards. But the truth is that great presidents, for the good of the country, have often negotiated the outer limits of the law. In 1940, FDR overrode the will of an isolationist Congress by crafting a controversial "executive agreement" that allowed the U.S. to provide Great Britain with destroyers it desperately needed to stave off Hitler. In 1948, Harry Truman circumvented filibustering southern senators by issuing an...