Charlie Savage: Bush's strategy of "picking presidential lawyers to fill court vacancies"
Charlie Savage writes today at TPMCafe regarding the Bush Administration's strategy of picking presidential lawyers to fill court vacancies is an integral part of the groundwork it has laid for a long-term expansion of White House power."
Tellingly, the administration chose all three [Supreme Court nominees] from a very narrow slice of the conservative legal universe: all three were executive branch legal warriors. They had each spent years marinating in disputes over expanding executive powers from the White House’s perspective, and were thus likely to bring a very deferential attitude to the bench when future lawsuits arose over aggressive claims of presidential authority. . . .
The average age of the five justices in the majority [of Hamdan, which represented the greatest setback to the Bush-Cheney legal team’s efforts to free the commander-in-chief from a need to obey laws and treaties] was greater than 72 at the time Hamdan was handed down, while the average age of the four justices in the minority was less than 59. Given the realities of the human life span, either Bush or some future president, one or two election cycles from now, will have ample opportunity to get that fifth vote. Hamdan may turn out not so much the final word as the last hurrah for the traditional view of checks and balances on presidential power.
Much more details on this topic can be found in chapter 11 of Charlie Savage's new book, Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy, which The San Francisco Chronicle has characterized as "A masterful work of investigative journalism . . . [that] deserves to be remembered as one of the key texts of the Bush years." Savage recently won a Pulitzer prize for his reporting on presidential signing statements.
ACS also released the first comprehensive index of presidential signing statements issued between 2001 and 2007. It was compiled by Professor Neil Kinkopf, author of a prior ACS Issue Brief on Signing Statements and the President's Authority to Refuse to Enforce the Law, released last year.