Addington: "We're Going To Push & Push Until Some LARGER FORCE Makes Us Stop"

The Terror Presidency
jurisprudence
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1from: Jack Goldsmith

Giving Away the President's Power

Posted Friday, Sept. 7, 2007, at 12:01 AM ET

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Addington would always ask two simple questions whenever someone proposed that the White House work with Congress to clear away a legal restriction or to get the legislature on board: "Do we have the legal power to do it ourselves?" (meaning on the president's sole authority), and "Might Congress limit our options in ways that jeopardize American lives?" In the Hamdi meeting and in many others, everyone agreed that the president had the lawful authority to detain enemy soldiers during wartime. We also could not deny that going to Congress might limit the president's power at the margins, or that the limitation might conceivably cause us to release a detainee or fail to get information that resulted in another attack.

Of course there was an obvious counterargument: The relentlessly unilateral approach in a novel war might lead us to lose in the Supreme Court in a way that tied the president's hands much tighter than Congress would, thus jeopardizing American lives (if one thought this way) even more. This argument had at least a little traction. Whenever the Supreme Court threatened to review one of the administration's terrorism policies, Paul Clement was able to eke out small concessions from the White House. On the day of the Hamdi meeting, for example, the White House agreed to push harder on the efforts already in progress to establish, as a matter of executive discretion, more formal procedural protections for detainees like the ones Haynes and his subordinates had crafted over a year earlier.

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Addington once expressed his general attitude toward accommodation when he said, "We're going to push and push and push until some larger force makes us stop." He and, I presumed, his boss viewed power as the absence of constraint. These men believed that the president would be best equipped to identify and defeat the uncertain, shifting, and lethal new enemy by eliminating all hurdles to the exercise of his power. They had no sense of trading constraint for power. It seemed never to occur to them that it might be possible to increase the president's strength and effectiveness by accepting small limits on his prerogatives in order to secure more significant support from Congress, the courts, or allies. They believed cooperation and compromise signaled weakness and emboldened the enemies of America and the executive branch. When it came to terrorism, they viewed every encounter outside the innermost core of most trusted advisers as a zero-sum game that if they didn't win they would necessarily lose.

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Addington's hard-line nonaccommodation stance always prevailed when the lawyers met to discuss legal policy issues in Alberto Gonzales' office. During these meetings, Gonzales himself would sit quietly in his wing chair, occasionally asking questions but mostly listening as the querulous Addington did battle with whomever was seeking to "go soft." It was Gonzales' responsibility to determine what to advise the president after the lawyers had kicked the legal policy matters around. But I only knew him to disagree with Addington once, on an issue I cannot discuss, and on that issue the president overruled Gonzales and sided with the Addington position.

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more at:
http://www.slate.com/id/2173488/entry/0/

a power hungry maniac.

They are blatantly usurping Congressional power BUT impeachment is off the table!

the last few thousand years of history.

As Speaker Pelosi has told us over and over again, Congress has more important things to do.

I'm not sure if something in the magnitude of an earthquake or a volcanic eruption will get them off course

“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” -- Frederick Douglass

~I grudgingly admired Addington's perverse integrity, even when I thought his judgments were crazy. ~

"So it along with impeachment are off the table"

hides it until a later date. CLEAN HOUSE NOW! Aren't we seeing a Watergate/Irancontra rehash? When a job isn't done right-it comes back to bite you in the butt.