Out of order: how the GOP broke Congress.

• Author: Drum, Kevin
• Position: The Broken Branch - Book review

The Broken Branch By Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein Oxford, $26.00

As George W. Bush is fond of reminding the American public, he is a wartime president. And you can hardly run a war if naysayers and ankle-biters are allowed to run around nipping at your heels all the time, can you?

At least that's how Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney appear to see things. Cheney in particular has long felt that presidential power was allowed to ebb dangerously during the '70s-era backlash against Richard Nixon's imperial presidency, and he came to office determined to reverse that course. To help him, he brought along two experienced bureaucratic warriors: Lewis "Scooter" Libby, his chief of staff until he was indicted in the Valerie Plame case last year, and David Addington, the pit bull lawyer who replaced Libby.

The fight to increase presidential power started early. A few weeks after taking office, Bush first postponed the scheduled release of presidential papers from previous administrations and then issued an executive order giving himself the power to restrict their release indefinitely. Later that year, the Department of Justice issued new rules limiting the use of Freedom of Information Act requests. And Cheney's determined efforts to keep the proceedings of his Energy Task Force secret are legendary.

But that was just a warmup; it was 9/11 that sent Bush's effort into high gear. At Addington's urging, Bush has appended "signing statements" to over 750 bills, essentially asserting his right to ignore the will of Congress if, in his opinion, it impinges on his presidential prerogatives. He has claimed the sole right to determine how enemy combatants are treated. He has vastly increased the number of documents classified "Secret" and "Top Secret" and has even authorized the reclassification of formerly public documents. He has denied habeus corpus for years to Jose Padilla, an American citizen, along the way doing everything he could to prevent the Supreme Court from ruling on the constitutionality of his actions. And he has authorized domestic surveillance programs by the National Security Agency that were never approved by either Congress or the courts.

On a dizzyingly broad array of fronts, in other words, he has pretty much asserted the authority to do anything he wants and to do it without any pesky oversight. The courts have--so far--not pushed back very hard against this, and that's not too surprising: Courts tend to work slowly...