entitled to abuse it.” Further, “people with power that they think is justified break rules not only because they can get away with it, but also because they feel at some intuitive level that they are entitled to take what they want. This sense of entitlement is crucial to understanding why people misbehave in high office. In its absence, abuses will be less likely. The word ‘privilege’ translates as ‘private law.’”
During the Bush 43 years, the culture of elite lawlessness slouched toward its most extreme, though logical, conclusions. The Bush administration expressly adopted the theory that the president is greater than the law, that his obligation to protect the nation means that nothing can limit what he does—not even the laws enacted by the American people through their Congress.
Indeed, during the Bush presidency, the Harvard professor of government and well-known neoconservative Harvey Mansfield published an article in the Weekly Standard perfectly summarizing the dominant view of America’s political and media class. Mansfield wrote that our “enemies, being extra-legal, need to be faced with extra-legal force”; that the office of the president is “larger” than the law; that “the rule of law is not enough to run a government”; that “ordinary power needs to be supplemented or corrected by the extraordinary power of a prince, using wise discretion”; and, most shockingly, that the American legal system is so constraining that it suggests the need for “one-man rule.” Mansfield’s advocacy may have been starker than most, but it was far from unusual. Its fundamental premise—that elites are the owners of law and thus cannot really violate it—echoes Nixon himself, who infamously told David Frost in a 1977 interview, “When the president does it, that means it is not illegal.”
In response to Bush-era declarations of elite lawlessness and presidential omnipotence, our sober guardians of political wisdom shrugged. Those who objected too strenuously, who used terms such as criminal and illegality or who raised the specter of impeachment—one of the tools created by the founders to redress executive lawbreaking—were branded as radicals, as unserious, partisan hysterics. The only crime recognized by official Washington was using impetuous or excessively irreverent language to object to the lawbreaking and radicalism of the Leader, or acting too aggressively to investigate them.
Bush 43 and his followers knew that they could freely break the law because our Washington establishment, our “political press,” would never object too strenuously, if at all. During the Bush presidency, the American media directed its hostility almost exclusively toward those who investigated or attempted to hold accountable the most powerful members of our political system; hence their attacks on the GOP prosecutor investigating the Bush administration’s crimes, their anger at the very few investigative reporters trying to uncover Washington’s secrets, and their righteous condemnation of each of the handful of attempts by Congress to exercise investigative oversight of the administration.
In Federalist 70 , Alexander Hamilton explained why the defining power of the king rendered the British monarchy intolerably corrupt: “In England, the king is a perpetual magistrate; and it is a maxim which has obtained for the sake of the public peace, that he is unaccountable for his administration, and his person sacred.” We have now come to approximate that state of affairs. In the aftermath of the George W. Bush years, replete with one act of high-level lawbreaking after the next, it cannot be reasonably denied that we have become exactly the country that Iran-Contra prosecutor Lawrence Walsh warned us we might turn into: one where “powerful people with powerful allies can commit serious crimes in high office—deliberately abusing the public trust without consequence.”
Evidence of domestic felonies
During the Bush 43 years, the culture of elite lawlessness slouched toward its most extreme, though logical, conclusions. The Bush administration expressly adopted the theory that the president is greater than the law, that his obligation to protect the nation means that nothing can limit what he does—not even the laws enacted by the American people through their Congress.
Indeed, during the Bush presidency, the Harvard professor of government and well-known neoconservative Harvey Mansfield published an article in the Weekly Standard perfectly summarizing the dominant view of America’s political and media class. Mansfield wrote that our “enemies, being extra-legal, need to be faced with extra-legal force”; that the office of the president is “larger” than the law; that “the rule of law is not enough to run a government”; that “ordinary power needs to be supplemented or corrected by the extraordinary power of a prince, using wise discretion”; and, most shockingly, that the American legal system is so constraining that it suggests the need for “one-man rule.” Mansfield’s advocacy may have been starker than most, but it was far from unusual. Its fundamental premise—that elites are the owners of law and thus cannot really violate it—echoes Nixon himself, who infamously told David Frost in a 1977 interview, “When the president does it, that means it is not illegal.”
In response to Bush-era declarations of elite lawlessness and presidential omnipotence, our sober guardians of political wisdom shrugged. Those who objected too strenuously, who used terms such as criminal and illegality or who raised the specter of impeachment—one of the tools created by the founders to redress executive lawbreaking—were branded as radicals, as unserious, partisan hysterics. The only crime recognized by official Washington was using impetuous or excessively irreverent language to object to the lawbreaking and radicalism of the Leader, or acting too aggressively to investigate them.
Bush 43 and his followers knew that they could freely break the law because our Washington establishment, our “political press,” would never object too strenuously, if at all. During the Bush presidency, the American media directed its hostility almost exclusively toward those who investigated or attempted to hold accountable the most powerful members of our political system; hence their attacks on the GOP prosecutor investigating the Bush administration’s crimes, their anger at the very few investigative reporters trying to uncover Washington’s secrets, and their righteous condemnation of each of the handful of attempts by Congress to exercise investigative oversight of the administration.
In Federalist 70 , Alexander Hamilton explained why the defining power of the king rendered the British monarchy intolerably corrupt: “In England, the king is a perpetual magistrate; and it is a maxim which has obtained for the sake of the public peace, that he is unaccountable for his administration, and his person sacred.” We have now come to approximate that state of affairs. In the aftermath of the George W. Bush years, replete with one act of high-level lawbreaking after the next, it cannot be reasonably denied that we have become exactly the country that Iran-Contra prosecutor Lawrence Walsh warned us we might turn into: one where “powerful people with powerful allies can commit serious crimes in high office—deliberately abusing the public trust without consequence.”
Evidence of domestic felonies
Similar Books
