Gary Hart on the National Security state - The President in Chains

[housewolf]

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The National Security Act of 1947 was the statutory basis for defining America’s role in the world post-World War II and for conducting the Cold War. It established a new Department of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Council, and the United States Air Force as a new military service. For more than six decades, it has also been the source of authority for the president as commander-in-chief.

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Gary Wills bolsters his provocative argument by listing all of the George W. Bush “security” measures quietly adopted and approved by the new Obama administration. His argument is not that President Obama was a closet neo-conservative who managed to fool the voters. Rather, he says, the national security state has become a kind of powerful prison with the president as warden. He has authority over it, but he cannot escape it.

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All this might make some plausible sense, but only if two things were true: one, that we are now locked into a kind of semi-permanent era of conflict and danger; and two that James Madison and his colleagues had not gone to considerable pains to create a genius system of checked-and-balanced government where power is concentrated in no single branch.

We should be concerned less about whether Bush officials are now happy with the concentrated power they have passed on to their successors and more about what James Madison would think about all this.

http://www.mattersofprinciple.com/?p=191