More on Giuliani, the Neocon Presidential Candidate

Steve Clemons, editor of the excellent foreign policy blog The Washington Note, writes about a recent Washington Monthly article on the Giuliani campaign, and in particular pointing out that the former New York mayor's track record indicates his presidency would likely see a continuance of the "Unitary Executive" philosophy re-initiated by John Yoo, Dick Cheney and the Bush Administration for prosecuting the "Global War on Terror."

As Clemons puts it, the Washington Monthly piece "exposes that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney may be small time aggrandizers of executive power compared to [Giuliani]."

Rachel Morris, who penned the Monthly article, argues that:

Today, Giuliani is a front-runner for the presidency of the United States. Since 9/11 the office he seeks has been radically remade. Led by Dick Cheney, the Bush administration has expanded White House powers to levels unseen since the Nixon years. Claiming an inherent authority to act outside the law, it has unilaterally set aside treaties, intercepted telephone calls between citizens without court warrants, detained individuals indefinitely without judicial review, ordered "enhanced interrogations," or torture, prohibited by law, and claimed the ability to disregard more than 1,000 parts of legislation that it has deemed to improperly restrict its authority. To thwart oversight and checks on its power, all spheres of executive branch operations have been fortified by heightened secrecy.

This expansion has warped policy decisions, undermined the country's authority abroad, and damaged the framework of laws, institutions, and processes that secure citizens against abuse by the state. It also prompts two of the most crucial, if as yet unasked, questions of the 2008 presidential race: Which contenders are most likely to relinquish some of these powers, or, at the very least, decline to fully use them? And, alternatively, which candidate is most likely to not only embrace the powers that Bush has claimed, but to seize more? The reply to the first question is complicated, but to the second it's simple: Rudy Giuliani.

Morris offers several notable characteristics of his political practices (or "management style" if you will) as Mayor, such as surrounding himself with Yes-men, pushing the envelope in terms of the legality of his actions, maintaining an unprecedented veil of secrecy around his policies as far as the public, watchdog groups, government oversight boards and the media were concerned and generally acting as though following the law was merely optional for a man as powerful and enlightened as himself.

If all of this sounds frighteningly familiar to the two terms of the George W. Bush Administration, then Morris has succeeded in elucidating the clear parallels between Bush 43 and the power-mad politician who would succeed him.

So what, then, would the election of Rudolph Giuliani as our 44th President next November really mean, in practical terms, for this country? According to Morris:

During his time as the mayor of New York, Giuliani's operating style became so ingrained, so pervasive, that we can imagine with some confidence what he might do with the power he would inherit as president. Already, he has surrounded himself with a group of accomplished legal advisors with especially muscular views of executive power and close ties to the Bush administration. Chief among them is Ted Olson, the solicitor general in Bush's first term. As head of the Office of Legal Counsel in the Reagan Justice Department, Olson helped develop the "unitary executive theory," which envisions a constrained role for Congress in regulating the executive branch.

By Giuliani's own admission, he would, as president, perpetuate many of Bush's boldest assertions of presidential authority. In 2006, Giuliani told the Wall Street Journal that he would probably keep the detention center at Guantanamo Bay open, saying that its conditions had been "grossly exaggerated." This year, at a New Hampshire town hall meeting, he refused to say whether the Bush administration had gone too far in denying the protection of the Geneva Conventions to terrorist suspects. Giuliani has also indicated that presidents have the power to indefinitely detain American citizens without trial. At a debate, he declared himself opposed to torture but refused to say whether he would outlaw waterboarding, instead offering that interrogators should perform "any method they can think of."

What is most disturbing is the likelihood that a Giuliani administration would venture beyond the expansive claims of executive authority staked out by the Bush White House. For instance, though Bush has demanded that Congress fund the war in Iraq, he has never openly questioned Congress's power of the purse. Giuliani, however, told a reporter that the president has the right to provide money for the troops to stay in Iraq even if Congress withdraws funding. Similarly, Bush has implied that critics of his Iraq policy are unpatriotic, but he has not declared that the government can silence their voices. This September, echoing the sentiments that he repeatedly attempted to enforce as mayor, Giuliani said that the "General Betray Us" ad paid for by the left-wing group MoveOn "passed a line that we should not allow American political organizations to pass."

One might minimize the significance of these kinds of statements as the loose talk of a candidate trying to impress conservative primary voters—indeed, that is how the press has generally treated them. To believe that Giuliani is merely grandstanding, however, is to ignore his history. If he reaches the White House, he will almost certainly do what he did at City Hall: punish dissent, circumvent the law, conceal the workings of the government in secrecy, and use his litigator's gifts to obstruct mechanisms of oversight and accountability.

Arthur Schlesinger Jr. once observed that the central conundrum of the American system of democracy is "to devise means of reconciling a strong and purposeful Presidency with equally strong and purposeful forms of democratic control." One of the weaknesses in the American form of government is that a leader, if determined enough, can thwart the constitutional checks on his power. The Founders weren't omniscient, and the governing apparatus they devised contains weak points that require a degree of good faith from its participants if the system is to work. In the past, with the possible exception of Richard Nixon, even the most forceful presidents didn't subvert the system of checks and balances as a matter of ideology or routine. Bush, Cheney, and Giuliani are different from each other in many ways, but they are alike in their scorn for the separation of powers.