Latest / The Nation Podcasts / Origins of the Imperial Presidency w/ David Sirota | The Time of Monsters with Jeet Heer

Transcript

Origins of the Imperial Presidency w/ David Sirota | The Time of Monsters with Jeet Heer · The Nation Podcasts

• 0:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: The old world is dying, the new world's focus reborn, now is the time of monsters.
• 0:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: With those words from Gramshee, I welcome you to the Time of Monsters Podcast.
• 0:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm G.K. of the Nation Magazine, the sponsor of the spotcast.
• 0:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: No, we often talk about Donald Trump and all his actions on this podcast, but I mean like I think one thing I've always emphasized is that we don't want to fall into the sort of great man theory of history or the great villain theory of history, which often gets right the mocked as, you know, orange man bad.
• 0:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Obviously the orange man is bad, but he's not bad in and of himself.
• 0:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: He is an entire system that has created him.
• 0:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, when you talk about the time of monsters, the time is as far as the monsters.
• 0:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: And what reason I've been very grateful to the news outlet, the lever, which is headed by David Sarota, is that they focused on the time as much as the monsters.
• 0:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: They really focused on the sort of
• 1:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: of contemporary problems, both through their daily reporting, and then the sort of longer research pieces that they've done, particularly the sort of podcasts that they've done, called the Master Plan.
• 1:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: We had David on previously to talk about the first season of Master Plan, which dealt with the corruption in politics, the long road that allowed money to become dominant in the United States, the court decisions and political machinations that made that possible.
• 1:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: and a new season of Master Plan has come out and again takes the sort of like long historical view and it's about something very pertinent now, which is the imperial presidency.
• 1:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Around the time that this podcast will appear, there will be the massive no kings protest and these protests are very heartening and welcome.
• 1:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean Donald Trump is ruling as an autocrat and the slogan no kings
• 1:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the question I think doesn't get asked enough, how did Donald Trump get to rule as a king?
• 1:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: How did he eventually accumulate so much power with the presidency?
• 2:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Why does the presidency act this way?
• 2:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think the lever and with this new podcast is one of the few outlets that's actually asking that very important question about the origins of the imperial presidency.
• 2:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I'm very happy to have on once again David.
• 2:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: First of all, welcome to the podcast.
• 2:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thanks, thanks for having me.
• 2:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I know that with both podcasts, you start off with Richard Nixon.
• 2:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think that's actually highly burdened as a sort of key pivotal moment when there was a real pushback against both corruption and public life and the imperial presidency.
• 2:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: So let's talk about these sort of this longer story here and why Nixon is such a pivotal figure.
• 2:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: Richard Nixon had a broad and expansive view of the presidency and the Watergate scandal, I think, was properly understood and really the Watergate era was properly understood as at that point, the pinnacle of what became known as the Imperial Presidency.
• 3:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: You had a president who was using his
• 3:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: political opponents in ways that have now become infamous, you know, bugging the DNC, all the, all the shenanigans at Watergate, but also a president who was asserting at that point unprecedented powers over warmaking and the budget.
• 3:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: Warmaking, here was a guy, Richard Nixon, who campaigned to end the Vietnam War, who within months had gotten into office and was secretly expanding the Vietnam War.
• 3:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: Again, in secret, covertly without the knowledge of Congress, expanding it into Cambodia.
• 3:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: Richard Nixon was when he came into office, he started asserting the right to decide whether or not to spend,
• 3:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: appropriations money on various projects across the country which may sound familiar to everybody because of course that's what happened right when Donald Trump came in.
• 4:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: So Richard Nixon was I think properly understood to be somebody who saw the president as a presidency, as a real imperial presidency and what happened after Watergate,
• 4:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: was that the backlash was in part a backlash to that view of expansive executive authority.
• 4:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so what you saw in the backlash and aftermath of Watergate were various initiatives to curtail the power of the executive.
• 4:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: You had the war powers act, which tried to put congressional
• 4:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: which restated in a much more explicit way than the Constitution does at the President cannot use Europe the Congress's power of the purse.
• 4:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: You had the entire church committee hearings and the like that looked into the executive branch's use and abuse of surveillance, domestic surveillance, et cetera, et cetera, which ultimately resulted in
• 5:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the requirement for warrants, again, more of a set of limits on executive power, and so there really was a moment in which the imperial presidency was curtailed.
• 5:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: Now, there was a backlash to the backlash.
• 5:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: because the person, one of the people who experienced the curtailment of executive power was the subsequent White House Gerald Ford and his chief of staff, Dick Cheney, and a lot of people who would go on to be in the Reagan administration.
• 5:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Rumsfeld was one of those as well.
• 5:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: Rumsfeld, exactly.
• 5:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: Rumsfeld was one of them as well.
• 5:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yes, there's a, as we call it, there's a, um, a master plan cinematic universe, a relatively small number of people, Dick Cheney Donald Rumsfeld, a John Bolton, a Sam Alito, John Roberts.
• 5:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, these names keep coming up.
• 6:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so what we trace in master plan is,
• 6:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: after watergate and after the post-watergate reforms that aimed to curtail the imperial presidency, we trace how the conservative movement really hatched a pretty coordinated plan to push back rebuild the imperial presidency into something
• 6:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: Richard Nixon never even dreamed of, and that project really starts with the Reagan presidency where they come into office and as people will hear, we found all these documents on earth, all these memos and documents, how they're
• 6:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: very, very specifically planning on an aggressive set of executive power grabs in all sorts of very shrewd ways in the bureaucracy.
• 6:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: We're talking about creating offices like what's known as awira, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, which seeks to take congressional
• 7:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: how to enforce them or even weather to enforce them.
• 7:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: There was all sorts of battles about executive privilege.
• 7:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: What information does the executive branch even have to provide to the Congress when the Congress comes asking?
• 7:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: Obviously, war-making powers, Ronald Reagan launched this series of military and operations without congressional approval, Grenada, Lebanon, and the like.
• 7:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: And each step of the way, what you see is the Justice Department under Ronald Reagan's Attorney General Edmise, trying to take an ever more expansive view of executive power and really britling at the idea.
• 7:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: that Congress should have the power that it has.
• 7:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I should also mention, of course, the hiring and firing issue that we've heard about Reagan's team trying to, and feeling frustrated by the independent agencies and the independent councils.
• 8:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: that are supposed to investigate executive branch abuses and wrongdoings.
• 8:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: The Reagan administration really not liking the idea of any kind of independent set of overseers over the executive branch.
• 8:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: And they have a lot of wins in the first term in Ronald Reagan's first term.
• 8:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: And to my mind, they got kind of cocky.
• 8:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: they got after he wins reelection in 1984 at a landslide and they start trying to just explicitly ignore it.
• 8:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: very, very clear statutes that Congress has passed about warmaking powers and talking specifically about funding proxy wars and military operations in Central America, ignoring Congress's prohibitions, they were called the Bolin Democrats at the time, and they get caught
• 8:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: in what becomes a massive scandal, the Iran-Contra scandal.
• 9:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: The Iran-Contra scandal we can talk more about it.
• 9:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: Very complicated scandal, but at its core, there's something very straightforward.
• 9:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: Does the executive branch have to listen?
• 9:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: to the Congress, when the Congress said you're not allowed to spend this money on these specific things.
• 9:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that was what that controversy was all about.
• 9:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I've just sort of given an overview here of the post-watergate backlash to the Imperial Presidency, the Reagan administration really rebuilding that Imperial Presidency, and then running into the wall of Iran country.
• 9:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, no, I think it's an excellent overview.
• 9:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: I want to highlight a few aspects of this.
• 9:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: One of which is why both the indexing and Reagan administration felt that they had to really centralize power in the executive, which is, I think, that they realized that a lot of what they wanted to do, they could not get past Congress.
• 9:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: that, you know, like the United States has a division of power, and actually, while people might elect Republican presidents, like when it came to like, you know, do you actually want to cut this particular program?
• 10:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Congress is the one that has the power of the press, and Congress even would feel the heat.
• 10:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think that applies to warmaking powers as well, especially, you know, in the wake of the Vietnam War, where there's a lot of sort of like popular opposition.
• 10:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I think in a lot of ways, like, already from the start, this sort of push towards
• 10:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: For the point of view of the right, it was defended as, well, we're defending democracy, you know, like Nixon got elected, Reagan got elected, they should be able to carry out their mandate.
• 10:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: That is the sort of right wing defense of the imperial presidency.
• 10:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: But actually, if you look at, you know, the facts on the ground, I think that there was actually one of the hardening things that is at that era, there's a lot of congressional opposition to what these presidents were doing.
• 10:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that's why the right went so heavily for the imperial presidency.
• 10:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: Absolutely.
• 10:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, you're really touching on something important here that master plan season one is about the legalization of corruption and we're talking right now about master plan season two the king makers and I think they're they're both seasons are part of a larger story and the larger story is a story of
• 11:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: Democracy itself being seen as a problem for a small handful of people who have most of the wealth and power in the country.
• 11:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: So if you're an oligarch, if you're a corporation, if you're a power broker, if you will, you look out at democracy, the public voting for things and getting what it wants.
• 11:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: You look out at that and you see it as a problem.
• 11:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: In fact, that's what the Powell memo written by soon to be Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell in the early 1970s.
• 11:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's how the Powell memo diagnosed, effectively, what the oligarchy in the business community saw as the problem.
• 11:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: One way to deal with that problem, then, is to, is master plan season one.
• 12:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: Let's legalize corruption so that we turn a one person one vote democracy that's delivering a lot for voters into a $1 one vote.
• 12:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: system that will better deliver more of the policies that the money wants.
• 12:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's one part of the plan.
• 12:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: Another part of the plan is let's centralize power in as few places as possible in the government and especially the places in the government.
• 12:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: that don't have to go home every two years and ask for voters consent.
• 12:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: Right, Congress is supposed to be, was set up to be the place that was closest to the public.
• 12:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so you touch on a really important point, why would power brokers, oligarchs, and the like want there to be such a powerful presidency?
• 12:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: And and secondarily, such powerful
• 13:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's because those are the less democratic, small-de-democratic institutions that don't have to necessarily deal with the demands as much of voters.
• 13:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: Now, yes, obviously a president is elected nationally, et cetera, et cetera.
• 13:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: But it's different than going back to a community every two years.
• 13:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: to make sure that there wasn't so much power concentrated in the least democratic institutions.
• 13:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think certainly we can we can say no matter what you think of the Constitution and what you think it's goals and thrusts were.
• 13:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think we should all regard the support of your political ideology, the able to understand that it is a fundamentally anti-monarchical document.
• 13:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, at its core, it's premises.
• 13:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: We have to diffuse power a little bit.
• 14:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: You have to disperse it.
• 14:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: It shouldn't be in the hands of one person.
• 14:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: And again, that becomes a problem.
• 14:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: if you're an oligarch or a corporation or a power broker that wants to ram through policies that are wildly unpopular among the electorate.
• 14:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: So you legalize corruption so you can buy the elections and you concentrate power or you try to in the hands of one person and if you get you're guy in there, he can do what you want without having to go home to this or that community
• 14:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, no, that's right.
• 14:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's right.
• 14:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 14:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, it's also like a system of text and balances, and I, you know, like a lot of the centralization of power deliberately goes against that.
• 14:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, like, I mean, I would actually like absolutely agree with you.
• 14:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, if you look at just a whole context of the American Revolution and the Constitution, it was against, you know, George III and the idea was that, you know, Bridget had a proper constitution where they had a parliament that had power
• 15:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, George is a third ruled absolutely and that that's not what the Americans wanted and the the whole idea was that the the executive could run the government but like Congress if you had to look at the Constitution Congress has like tremendous power like especially those sort of like the power of the first the power to declare war the power over tariffs and what what is amazing and you know that I mean I think the story that doesn't get enough attention is how did these powers get eroded.
• 15:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: So to return to the Reagan era, I mean, as you mentioned, you know, one component was a niece and the Department of Justice under Reagan really pushing that.
• 15:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, a round counter, I think, is perhaps worth dwelling a little bit, because again, it's the same story where Congress, at that time was actually, you know,
• 15:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: carrying out its constitutional duty, like you should not have an American president that it's getting like you know like involved in military adventures without like congressional input.
• 15:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think it's worth remembering because we have a sort of stereotypical view of the 1980s is Reagan here or Reagan was supreme, but actually there's like a lot of popular opposition to Reagan.
• 16:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: you know, especially like once they had this overreach and there was like a lot of Congress stood up to the president and in a lot of ways Iran contra seems like they're like the precursor of a lot of what has come since then especially of this sort of like privatization of foreign policy and then the use of these foreign governments as sort of like cutouts.
• 16:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean like do you want to talk a little bit about about that because I mean like I think it's
• 16:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: interesting this kind of like, you know, the Saudi arms dealers and these sort of is really state of the way that they help the president do policies that had no popular appeal.
• 16:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, that seems like very current right now.
• 16:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: Absolutely.
• 16:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, the Reagan administration was trying to wage and fund a proxy war as part of the Cold War in Central America, and sort of have it both ways.
• 16:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like fund the war, but not necessarily deploy directly that many American troops, Congress, remember at that time,
• 17:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: The Vietnam War was a fresh memory.
• 17:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's only 10 years later.
• 17:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so Congress had passed a series of amendments saying you cannot use money to fund this kind of covert by proxy military operation in Central America.
• 17:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: And the Reagan administration really didn't like it.
• 17:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: was back in 1980, he was called Mandate for Leadership, which we dug up from the Heritage Foundations, it's a big policy Bible.
• 17:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: And one of the throughlines in that policy Bible is to basically the Congress should have no role in national security and foreign policy.
• 17:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so that was really baked in a Ronald Reagan endorsed Mandate for Leadership, gave it out to his cabinet, the first cabinet meeting.
• 17:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: So
• 17:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: It really was that idea that attitude was really baked into how the Reagan administration saw its executive power rights when it comes to foreign policy and they really did at least Reagan's underlings did, whether you think it was Reagan himself or not, he sort of said he didn't really know what was going on.
• 18:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: But they really thought that they could essentially ignore Congress.
• 18:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, Oliver North, who we have a whole episode coming out on, Oliver North, in his congressional hearing, said, I was trying to hide it from Congress.
• 18:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yes, I'm not making any, it's not your business, right?
• 18:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think what comes out from Oliver North and that whole scandal is, in some ways, they were pretty honest about their views of this.
• 18:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: They're honest about their view that the presidency should not be inhibited in any way.
• 18:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: And ultimately, what comes out of this is, what is known as the unitary executive theory.
• 19:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: And for those who don't know what that is,
• 19:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's a lot of these arguments about what the White House and the executive ranch is allowed to do within the confines of laws passed by Congress.
• 19:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: That was a lot of what Ronald Reagan and his administration was trying to fight it out on in his first term.
• 19:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: But by the second term, they were frustrated and they were looking for something that would supersede those arguments.
• 19:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 19:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: And what they sort of came up with under Ed Mesa's Justice Department,
• 19:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: They could no pun intended Trump the arguments about, well, this statute gives us this power or that statute gives us that power.
• 19:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: The unitary executive theory is a constitutional argument that says because of article two in the Constitution, which says executive power is bested in a president.
• 19:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: their argument is Congress has no right, has not allowed to pass any such law that inhibits the executive branch.
• 20:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: So in other words, instead of saying, well, this law lets us do that and that law that you pass lets us do this and we're taking a broad view of it.
• 20:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: The Unitary Executive Theory birthed in the Reagan administration was starting to say, none of those laws apply to us because they're all unconstitutional.
• 20:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that ultimately comes to a head in the fight over the independent council.
• 20:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: And for those who don't know, you know, Iran contra was investigated by an independent council.
• 20:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: You may remember, for those who remember Watergate or Red, the history of Watergate, there was a special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, that was appointed to investigate
• 20:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: Watergate, the idea being that the Justice Department appointed by Nixon appointees could not investigate itself.
• 20:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: So they had to appoint somebody who would have the power to investigate without and be protected from executive branch punishment.
• 21:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: And out of that came a law when Jimmy Carter was elected, the Ethics and Government Act, which enshrined that process.
• 21:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: And said, look, when the executive branch is credibly accused of breaking the law, an independent prosecutor, an independent counsel can be appointed.
• 21:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: That happened in Iran, contrary, it happened in a number of controversies in the Reagan administration.
• 21:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: And obviously, the Reagan folks hated it.
• 21:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: They hated the whole law.
• 21:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: They thought under the unitary executive theory that it was unconstitutional.
• 21:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: Their argument was, any person operating in executive functions must be according to the Constitution under the control and power of the executive.
• 21:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: And ultimately out of Iran, contra came a very important Supreme Court case in which they tried to challenge the constitutionality of the whole independent council law.
• 21:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think they thought they were going to get a big win.
• 21:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: And ultimately, what happened was they actually got a huge loss, a seven to one decision at the Supreme Court in a case called a Morrison V. Olson in which the court said, no, there can be an independent council, we're rejecting the unitary executive argument.
• 22:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: There was though one dissenter.
• 22:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: and that the center, of course, not surprisingly, was Ronald Reagan's appointee, Antonin Scalia.
• 22:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 22:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: And in his dissent, it becomes a kind of famous dissent in the conservative movement because it really does articulate from a Supreme Court justice and an expansive, unitary executive theory argument that ultimately comes back to become a major cause.
• 22:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: The next time the Republicans have the presidency, which is under George W. Bush and Dick Chang.
• 22:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I don't know.
• 22:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it's worth emphasizing, like Scalia was like way out of bounds of, like, sort of, like, constitutional history in the Morrison of the Olson.
• 22:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because, like, if you just, like, look at the plain text of the Constitution, like there is so much power that's invested in Congress.
• 23:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: And particularly, like, you know, this whole issue of the power of the Paris.
• 23:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: That is actually the basis
• 23:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: of like not just American democracy but democracy in all parliamentary governments like you know going back to like the English Civil War like this is like a key principle that you know like only the people who are elected you know only elected representatives can vote for taxes and so in a lot of ways I mean like around contra was a way to circumscribe that to like work around you know the power that congress has by like raising money through these arms deals
• 23:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: So it is actually, I mean, this is a really remarkable, like, sort of, constitutional revolution that, you know, like this unitary executive theory, you know, coming out of these championed by Scalia, comes to the fore.
• 23:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: And as you mentioned, like, I think most of us became aware of it was under George W. Bush, like, you know, after 9-11, there was like an massive attempt to grab hours.
• 23:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: So let's talk about like that era.
• 24:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: and have some of these, as you said, these members of the Master Plan Cinematic Universe are like Cheney and Rumswell.
• 24:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Voodins smarting for decades, it's been very upset at like watergate and these sort of, you know, rollback of the Imperial Presidency, now they got to like push for what they really wanted.
• 24:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean, I think we have to remember that, and in our series, we sort of tell the story up to Iran, contra and, and then we have to like go back again because there's a concurrent history where Dick Cheney is, and, and Don Rumsfeld are sort of the forest gumps showing up in the background in so many of these controversies, right?
• 24:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: Dick Cheney is the guy who is the,
• 24:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: who was trying to use executive power to withhold information from the church commission that was looking into domestic spying right in the mid-1970s.
• 24:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: Dick Cheney is the lead dissenting voice of the Iran-Contra investigation that issues the minority report that tries to blame Congress.
• 25:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: for the Iran-Contra scandal, saying that really this is a problem of Congress being too nosy in trying to restrict the presidency.
• 25:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, there's an amazing quote that Jamie said and wrote,
• 25:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: really articulating and being really kind of a publicly a kind of almost lone dissenter saying, you know, the problem here is that the president didn't have enough power.
• 25:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: The problem here is that the Congress was getting in the way of what Oliver North, etc., etc., wanted to do.
• 25:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so Dick Cheney, of course, right after the Iran-Contra scandal, he becomes secretary of defense.
• 25:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: And he leads the charge to try to go to war in Iraq, the first war, arguing that a war in Iraq wouldn't require.
• 26:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: declaration of war.
• 26:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: Now, George H. W. Bush ultimately did go to Congress and get a declaration of war, but Dick Cheney and Front of Congress was very clear in hearings about this.
• 26:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: We don't need one.
• 26:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: Or at least that was his argument.
• 26:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: Dick Cheney, then, of course, a couple of years later becomes vice president.
• 26:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: And when 9.11 happens, Dick Cheney uses 9.11 as a rationale to take all of these ideas that he's been working on and put them into action.
• 26:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, the most obvious and clear way he does this is through the so-called warrantless wire tapping.
• 26:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: which is right now, by the way, being litigated in Congress today.
• 26:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like as we speak, this is back up for renewal.
• 26:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: But back after 9-11, Cheney and Bush signed secret orders, putting into place a surveillance scheme in which they said they didn't even have to get
• 27:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: judicial approval via warrants.
• 27:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: And let's be clear, warrants in the requirement for warrants is right in the constitution, right?
• 27:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: That is something the constitution is like really clear about.
• 27:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: It does not leave much to imagination.
• 27:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: And Bush and Cheney completely ignored it.
• 27:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, they made national security arguments, et cetera, et cetera.
• 27:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: They ignored the same set of constitutional constraints on torture, and so Dick Cheney really puts into play, puts into action a unitary executive view of the presidency after 911.
• 27:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: It was spring-loaded really from all the work that he had done up until that point, and of course,
• 27:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: towards the end of the Bush administration and I'm alighting a lot here, but there is a debate about warrantless wire tapping as an example, but ultimately at the end of the Bush administration, the Congress actually in 2008 enshrines the power of warrantless wire tapping.
• 28:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: So the Congress finally at the end of the Bush era signs on to handing over this unfettered power
• 28:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: to the executive branch saying you can do this kind of surveillance without having to have any judicial oversight whatsoever.
• 28:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: So what we see is that Congress in the Bush administration, the Bush administration building an imperial presidency much bigger than Richard Nixon had imagined, Congress starts signing on to it.
• 28:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: And of course, then you get into the Obama era,
• 28:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: where Obama had voted for, as a senator, in shrining warrantless wiretapping as part of the law.
• 28:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: Obama then
• 28:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: expands in a huge way, the drone war.
• 28:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: Obama, like when you think of Obama and executive power, let me be clear, the Obama administration was not going in the court making specifically unitary executive theory arguments.
• 29:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: They were not citing article two to try to do whatever they want, however.
• 29:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: They did literally go into court asserting the right to put American citizens on a so-called kill list for drone termination, an extra judicial drone attacks against known American citizens.
• 29:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: And to be clear, they went into court and ultimately it came out these secret office of legal counsel documents in which they're articulating a legal argument for this
• 29:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: backs off on ruling one way or the other, but sort of in doing that, normalizes it and makes it what what we have today.
• 29:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: So when you see Donald Trump launching, you know, drone attacks on boats without any congressional authorization at all.
• 30:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: you have to run back the clock and say, well, where did that power come from?
• 30:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, it came from, in part, the Obama administration.
• 30:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: And the Obama folks don't like to talk about this very much, but that is the truth.
• 30:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I don't know, actually, when you just say, it brings up two different aspects.
• 30:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, one is a sort of congressional complicity or responsibility for this.
• 30:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the other is the sort of Democrats.
• 30:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I want to think both, like, sort of separately and they'd like, let's disentangle this a little bit.
• 30:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, it is very striking that a lot of the sort of power that is accrued to the presidency has been from like sort of like Congress signing off power.
• 30:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, as I mentioned, like, you know, the tariff case is very clear, like in black and white, in the Constitution, that the tariff powers belong to Congress.
• 30:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: But like Congress like handed it over to the president with the idea that it's better to have like one president negotiate this rather than work through each tariff individually.
• 30:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think something like that has happened with war powers, where even with the war power resolution, it's Congress has been very, very reluctant to actually use the power that it has constitutionally.
• 31:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: So what do we say about this?
• 31:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Why is like, and at the third aspect, in terms of several Congress seating its sort of power is the way that Newt Gingrich destroyed the sort of staffing of congressional offices, so that they couldn't have
• 31:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: legislation and what that meant was that like the actual and new sources of research would be these sort of private think tanks like heritage, which I think like sort of like again feeds into sort of presidential power.
• 31:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like it is a way in which Congress is giving up its own ability to research into legislation, interview people.
• 31:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: So what do we say about this?
• 31:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: The read with the Imperial Presidency isn't just like these sort of power mad presidents but
• 31:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think you've touched on some really good examples.
• 31:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: And Gingrich, hollowing out Congress's ability to do investigations, to have real policy know-how, which ultimately, as you say, it ends up allowing private actors to fill in those roles.
• 32:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: It also obviously allows the much more vast executive branch to fill those roles in other word, flushing out policy.
• 32:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: to be Congress essentially surrendering its power as a co-equal branch of the government.
• 32:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think the way we explain that, I actually think the flaw in the founders' assumptions.
• 32:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: was that they assumed that if you were in one of the branches of government, you would jealously guard your power inside of that branch.
• 32:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: The idea is, I'm in Congress, I don't want to give up my power.
• 32:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: Even if I'm in a confrontation or a conflict with somebody in another branch of the government who's in my party, I'm going to defend the institutional prerogatives of my branch.
• 33:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think that assumption has broken down.
• 33:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think perhaps that assumption was correct for a long time in America, where you saw a Democratic chairman in the 1960s going up against Lyndon Johnson and then having fights and you know, sort of intro party fighting over institutional prerogatives, Congress versus the executive branch versus the courts, etc.
• 33:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: But I think now we live in an era where the
• 33:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: The political party is the institution that is supreme.
• 33:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: So if you're a Republican congressperson, you're not defending the power of Congress when you look at Donald Trump and Donald Trump ignoring Congress.
• 33:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: You're saying, I'm happy to give up more and more power as a member of Congress, because I'll be rewarded by my party.
• 33:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: in all sorts of other ways.
• 33:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: Maybe I'll get a point to a job in the executive branch, is a cabinet secretary, maybe I'll get a job in a lobbyist over here.
• 34:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I think the supremacy of the party has as the institution that the paradigms are around, has ended up with people in different parts of the government
• 34:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: defaulting to conceding power to the dear leader in the White House, who is both the president and the head of the party.
• 34:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, I think that's an excellent explanation and I think we see that like just by how Trump runs clear Congress and now they're all eager to kiss the ring and to be, you know, given jobs in the White House.
• 34:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: You never hear them say like the president, the Republicans, you never hear them say the president did this and it like trampled.
• 34:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: my authority is a chairman of a committee or you never hear that because they're not defending institutional prerogatives of what they perceive to be a co-equal branch of government, they are first and foremost defending the party.
• 35:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, no, I think that's absolutely right.
• 35:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: And now we're really coming to the end of these of conversation.
• 35:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: But I just, like very briefly, maybe a minute or less.
• 35:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's a very important point that you had made earlier and I went on to score at that this is not just, I mean, we see the trumpets of most extreme examples of those, a real autocrat, but it is a sort of bipartisan problem.
• 35:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: So you just want to like, quickly say something about that.
• 35:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: It is definitely a bipartisan problem, I mean, I think, you know, what you can say about the Democrats is they have not made as many constitutional arguments for the imperial presidency.
• 35:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: Again, the Obama administration was not using the the unitary executive theory, but I do think that both parties
• 35:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: have shown overly, in my view, too much difference to executive authority when their president is in power.
• 35:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it's it's short cited in the sense of it's it's not imagining what the power would be used for when the other party gets in the power.
• 36:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: Uh, it's, it's, it's at best short term thinking and like, for instance, when when they reauthorized, uh, warrantless surveillance under Biden, the Democrats joined on to that, uh, it was like, well, you know, he's our president.
• 36:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's not going to abuse it.
• 36:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, guess what?
• 36:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, a year and a half later Donald Trump's president, right?
• 36:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I think there's a, there's a short sightedness here.
• 36:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think we're now all being taught a lesson.
• 36:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: that this can go too far, that I have to believe that most people, or certainly a lot of people are learning, hey, maybe the founders were really right.
• 36:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like all the power shouldn't be in the hands of one person.
• 36:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: And we are really in uncharted waters, no straight of foremoves metaphor intended, right?
• 36:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: But like we're now talking at a time when a president woke up one day,
• 37:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: with no authorization from Congress at all and decided to launch effectively a version of World War III.
• 37:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: And like this is just like happening and this is the cautionary tale that I hope if we understand how the Imperial presidency was built not just today but over 50 years how there can be a movement to sort of
• 37:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: unwind some of it and recognize that this is the cautionary tale and the cautionary tale will get worse unless there's a real effort to reign in its worst abuses.
• 37:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: No, absolutely.
• 37:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 37:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: And for more on this, for the History of the Imperial Presidency, but also history of the battles against the Imperial Presidency, I recommend the lever podcast.
• 37:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: I want to thank David for being on the program.
• 37:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'll link to the Master Plan podcast.
• 37:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: And yeah, once again, thanks for being on the program.
• 38:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thank you.
• 38:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thanks so much for having me.