In recent judicial confirmation battles, PresidentBush has repeatedly—and correctly—stressed fideli-ty to the Constitution as the key qualification forservice as a judge. It is also the key qualification forservice as the nation’s chief executive. On January 20, 2005, for the second time, Mr. Bush took thepresidential oath of office set out in the Consti-tution, swearing to “preserve, protect and defendthe Constitution of the United States.” With fiveyears of the Bush administration behind us, wehave more than enough evidence to make an assess-ment about the president’s commitment to ourfundamental legal charter.Unfortunately, far from defending the Consti-tution, President Bush has repeatedly sought tostrip out the limits the document places on federalpower. In its official legal briefs and public actions,the Bush administration has advanced a view of federal power that is astonishingly broad, a view that includes
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a federal government empowered to regu-late core political speech—and restrict itgreatly when it counts the most: in the daysbefore a federal election;
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a president who cannot be restrained,through validly enacted statutes, from pur-suing any tactic he believes to be effective inthe war on terror;
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a president who has the inherent constitu-tional authority to designate American citi-zens suspected of terrorist activity as “enemy combatants,” strip them of any constitution-al protection, and lock them up withoutcharges for the duration of the war on ter-ror—in other words, perhaps forever; and
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a federal government with the power to super- vise virtually every aspect of American life,from kindergarten, to marriage, to the grave.President Bush’s constitutional vision is, inshort, sharply at odds with the text, history, andstructure of our Constitution, which authorizesa government of limited powers.
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Gene Healy is senior editor at the Cato Institute and author of “Arrogance of Power Reborn: The Imperial Presidency and Foreign Policy in the Clinton Years”(Cato InstitutePolicy Analysis no. 389). Timothy Lynch isdirector of the Cato Institute’s Project on Criminal Justice and author of “Dereliction of Duty: The Constitutional Record of President Clinton”(Cato Institute Policy Analysis no. 271).
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