Dec 23, 2005 
Glenn Greenwald asked Bush defenders to “explain how there can be any limits at all on his power under the theories of Executive Power which they are advocating to argue that Bush had the right to violate Congressional law.”
In response, there are two posts from Leon at Red State.org and two posts from Jeff Goldstein at Protein Wisdom, one of which largely relied on what Jeff reverently calls “a long and meticulously argued post” from John Hinderaker at Powerline. Leon also alerted me by e-mail to the issuance yesterday of a Memorandum from the Department of Justice (.pdf) which sets forth the Administration’s legal defense of its behavior.
The “long and meticulously argued post” includes these representative paragraphs:
The starting point, of course, is the Constitution. Article II of the Constitution sets out the powers and duties of the President. Some people do not seem to realize that the executive branch is coequal with the legislative and judicial branches. The President has certain powers under the Constitution, and they cannot be taken away or limited by Congressional legislation any more than the President can limit the powers of Congress by executive order. …
… This brings us back where we started, i.e., the Constitution. The only constitutional limitation on the President’s power to intercept communications by Americans for national security purposes is that such intercepts be “reasonable.” Is it reasonable for the administration to do all it can to identify the people who are communicating with known terrorists overseas, via the terrorists’ cell phones and computers, and to learn what terrorist plots are being hatched by those persons? Is it reasonable to do so even when—rather, especially when–some portion of those communications come from people inside the United States? I don’t find it difficult to answer those questions; nor, if called upon to do so, would the Supreme Court.
In other words, the President is not bound to follow laws passed by Congress if (in his discretion) he believes they infringe on his powers, and he can engage in warrantless searches that he (in his discretion) deems “reasonable.” And these decisions may be made in secret.
That’s pretty much absolute power, is it not? So the answer must be, no; there are no limits to the President’s powers.
The rest of the blog posts boil down to “you lefties don’t understand that we’re at war.” And Judd at Think Progress addresses the DoJ memo here. Be sure to read the rest of Glenn Greenwald’s post; it is outstanding.
The righties continue to churn out turgid screeds of legalosity to defend Bush’s warrantless search policy. And they continue to use the straw man argument that we lefties are opposed to surveillance of potential terrorists. (Once again, no one is arguing against surveillance, just that it be conducted within the law.) But after all this time the righties have yet to provide satisfactory answers two simple questions: Why not comply with FISA? And if FISA is cumbersome, why not ask Congress for changes in the regulations?
Hello? Righties? Anybody ….. ?
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