Bush's expansions of Presidential power

Bush's response to the anti-torture provisions to which he supposedly agreed made me aware for the first time of a tactic he has been using to assert extra-Constitutional power to ignore laws he doesn't like.  He writes an official "signing statement" when he signs the legistlation into law describing his own interpretation of the legislation.

And he did that with the McCain anti-torture legislation. Sidney Blumenthal explains in Bush's war on professionals Salon 01/05/06:

Last week, when Bush signed the military appropriations bill containing the amendment forbidding torture that he and Vice President Cheney had fought against, he added his own "signing statement" to it. It amounted to a waiver, authorized by him alone, that he could and would disobey this law whenever he chose. He wrote: "The executive branch shall construe Title X in Division A of the Act, relating to detainees, in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President to supervise the unitary executive branch and as Commander in Chief and consistent with the constitutional limitations on the judicial power, which will assist in achieving the shared objective of the Congress and the President, evidenced in Title X, of protecting the American people from further terrorist attacks." In short, the president, in the name of national security, claiming to protect the country from terrorism, under war powers granted to him by himself, would follow the law to the extent that he decided he would.

Sen. John McCain, the sponsor of the anti-torture legislation, according to sources close to him, says that he has not determined how or when he might respond to Bush's "signing statement." McCain wishes to raise other issues, like ghost detainees, and he may wait to see how the administration responds to the new law. However, with responsibility for oversight moved from the Armed Services Committee to the Senate Intelligence Committee, chaired by White House tool Pat Roberts, McCain and others have no reliable way of knowing whether the administration is complying. Once again, torture policy enters a shadow land. (my emphasis)

It also jumped out at me here that Bush used the phrase "unitary executive branch".  The expansive theory of Presidential power proposed by John Yoo, a major player in coming up with the administration's legal framework for torture, is known as the "unitary executive" theory.  It argues that basically the President can ignore any law or Constitutional provision he chooses to ignore as long as he claims it's necessary for national security.

I don't like to toss around terms like "dictator".  But a legal doctrine that says the President can decide on his own discretion whether or not to violate a law or the Constitution is pretty much a justification for dictatorship, even in a purely descriptive sense of the word.  Today's Republican Party is operating to a large extent on authoritarian assumptions, as opposed to democratic ones.

It also reminds us of how little the Republican "moderates" have done to restrain this.  I have mentioned more than once here that I was very skeptical about the effects of McCain's anti-torture provisions.  Because if Bush had decided to violate the anti-torture laws that were already in force, why would he bother to obey this one?  At this point, only by aggressive oversight aimed at exposing illegal activity in this regard and putting a stop to it can Congress make McCain's famous anti-torture law anything other than empty public relations.