"To understand is not to excuse: No president should have the powers President Bush has sought and seized during the past seven years. But after 9/11 and Katrina, what rationally self-interested chief executive would hesitate to centralize power in anticipation of crisis? That pressure would be hard to resist, even for a president devoted to the Constitution and respectful of the limited role the office was supposed to play.
Barack Obama has done more than any presidential candidate in memory to boost expectations for the office. Obama's stated positions on civil liberties may be preferable to McCain's, but if and when a car bomb goes off somewhere in America, would a President Obama be able to resist resorting to undeclared wars and the Bush theory of unrestrained executive power? As a Democrat without military experience, publicly perceived as weak on national security, he'd have much to prove.
As Jack Goldsmith put it in his 2007 book, "For generations the Terror Presidency will be characterized by an unremitting fear of devastating attack, an obsession with preventing the attack, and a proclivity to act aggressively and preemptively to do so...If anything, the next Democratic president - having digested few threat matrices, and acutely aware that he or she alone will be wholly responsible when thousands of Americans are killed in the next attack - will be even more anxious than the current president to thwart that threat.
Law professors Jack Balkin of Yale and Sanford Levinson of the University of TExas at Austin are both Democrats and civil libertarians, so they take no pleasure in their prediction that "the next Democratic president will likely retain significant aspects of what the Bush administration has done." Indeed, they write in a 2006 Fordham Law Review article, future Democratic presidents "may find that they enjoy the discretion and lack of accountability crated by Bush's unilateral gambits."
Throughout the 20th century, more and more Americans looked to the central government to deal with highly visible public problems, from labor disputes to crime waves to natural disasters. And as responsibility flowed to the center, power accrued with it. If that trend continues, responses to matters of great public concern will be increasingly federal, increasingly executive, and increasingly military.
In the years to come, many Americans will find that the results of executive action are not to their liking. And if history is any guide, they'll respond by vilifying the officeholder and looking for another knight on horseback to set things right again."
