Conservatives Without Conscience

Cheney sent a clear signal of his plans for the ongoing efforts to further enhance presidential powers by elevating David Addington, his former counsel, to replace his indicted former chief of staff, Scooter Libby. Addington is a low-profile, high-powered, table-pounding, sarcastic when-not-shouting-in-your-face attorney.[75] Addington is a paradigm authoritarian, instrumental in gathering the team of lawyers who prepared legal opinions for the Department of Justice authorizing American interrogators to engage in torture. Addington teamed up with John Yoo, a law professor who clerked for the most far-right members of the federal judiciary—first Judge Laurence Silberman of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, and then U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas—and who had never met a presidential power that Article II of the Constitution excluded. Together they worked on figuring out how to get around criminal laws that prohibit torture and electronic surveillances of Americans. In doing so they have offered highly specious arguments that start with the end result they seek and twist the law to fit the conclusion they want to reach. Not surprisingly, they have horrified the intellectually honest legal minds of other conservative Bush lawyers, like former deputy attorney general James Comey, who got out of the Justice Department, it appears, as quickly as he could. And former assistant attorney general Jack Goldsmith left Justice when he had had enough of Addington’s power tantrums.[76]

Addington, who was in his early teens during Vietnam and Watergate, reportedly shares the view of his boss that “the executive branch was pitifully weakened by the backlash” to these events.[77] One has to wonder about Cheney and Addington’s motives in seeking to restore the presidency to what they believe to be its pre–Vietnam and Watergate backlash days. Are these men unaware of why Congress clamped down on presidents’ spying on Americans? Have they not read the transcripts of Richard Nixon pounding on his desk to demand a break-in at the Brookings Institution because he wanted documents he believed to be in their vault? Could they be unaware of the record of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI when it had unfettered powers? Why, if the powers of the presidency are wanting, do they not go to Congress and lay out what they need, rather than violating the law to see if they can get away with it? Do they not realize they are calling for—and are busy implementing—an authoritarian presidency, unchecked by the Congress or the courts? Have they forgotten that the underlying ideal of our democracy is the rule of law—not rule by presidential whim? It is still not clear how far these men want to take their authoritarianism, but I cannot find any examples of authoritarians leading any government where the governed wanted to go.

Legitimizing Authoritarian Conservatism: The Ugly Politics of Fear

If George Bush had not selected Dick Cheney as his running mate in 2000, and if the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington had not occurred in 2001, authoritarian conservatism could not have surfaced in the executive branch with its current ferocious sense of purpose. When a president embraces a concept, though, it gains legitimacy throughout the federal establishment, as political appointees—those several thousand men and women who serve at the pleasure of the president, head up various departments and agencies, or work on the White House staff—follow their leader. Depending on the president (or, in the case of the current administration, the vice president), varying degrees of dissent are tolerated in the decision-making process, but once policy is set, political appointees are expected to carry it out or leave. This is what happens within an authoritarian government. For example, when Jack Goldsmith (now on the faculty of Harvard Law School) disagreed with the authoritarian policies being issued by the White House—policies calling for the use of torture and directing the National Security Agency to violate the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act by not seeking warrants for electronic surveillance of Americans—he became a marked man. Goldsmith left the Justice Department, as have other high-level attorneys who wanted no part of the administration’s disregard for the rule of law.[78]