Here's how the Bush administration has abandoned American democracy

Attorney Jack Balkin has written an interesting analysis of how the Supreme Court has smacked down the Bush administrations severe, even tyrannical, overreach in the wake of 9/11. (I'm going to convert his paragraph to bullet points.)

Following the 9/11 attacks, George W. Bush and his supporters proposed a significant chance in constitutional norms, centered around increased presidential power to fight the war on terror. This vision included

• (1) a doctrine of preemptive war,
• (2) new surveillance techniques, including domestic surveillance,
• (3) a new system of preventive detention, including detention of american citizens without access to courts,
• (4) the creation of legal black holes like Guantanamo Bay and CIA black sites,
• (5) use of torture and torture-lite to obtain information,
• (6) enhanced secrecy and classification policies, and
• (7) a version of unitary executive theory that claimed that Congress could not constitutionally limit the President when he claimed to act under his powers as Commander-in-Chief. The last idea was also articulated in
• (8) the expansion of the use of constitutional signing statements, in which the President would state that he would disregard certain features of laws passed by Congress without telling the public any details about the scope or extent of his non-enforcement.

The Bush Administration sought to cement this new constitutional vision to the already regnant version of movement conservatism. It sought to reorient the conservative movement away from primarily domestic concerns after the fall of Communism and toward a focus on a muscular foreign policy and unilateral Presidentialism. This was not hard to do for two reasons: first, American conservatism needed to replace its focus on anti-Communism with a new set of foreign policy goals, pursued with equal fervor. Second, some of the theoretical moves undergirding Bush's vision of the Presidency on steroids had already been articulated in the Reagan Administration.

By 2008, we can say that this attempt at a constitutional revolution has failed. The Supreme Court resisted the Administration's attempts to get it to legitimate the new regime.

The only thing I could add to that is that the Supreme Court only barely overrode Bush's Constitutional revolution. Four of the nine justices dissented in overriding it in highly intemperate language.

If anyone wants to keep America true to the vision held by the founding fathers after the Revolution of 1776 this effort by conservatives has to be spiked throughly and then continually fought against. Had Justice Kennedy sided with the tyrannical Catholic Justices, the next step could well have required violent revolution to reverse the series of really, really bad ideas Bush has been implementing with the help of the likes of John Yoo.

Modern conservatism simply doesn't work. For Conservatives to maintain power in the face of their obvious and frequent failures (over and above their penchant for corruption), they have to prevent free speech that exposes their failures and then eliminate democracy and implement a single all-powerful executive supported by one-party rule. That's what those attempted changes in Constitutional norms are all about. Not defending America, but maintaining Conservative power.

The Supreme Court decision handed them a set-back, but it was a near thing depending on a majority of only a single Supreme Court Justice.

That's too close, and it's only temporary. The next stage of the battle is the Presidential election between Obama, representing traditional American democracy and McCain who supports further moves towards the militaristic autocratic King McCain wielding the power of the Unitary Executive described by John Yoo under the guidance of Dick Cheney and handed off by Cheney to John McCain if he can.