Ethics

Bush's Latest Power Grab

By Ed Brayton

Nat Hentoff writes of a new rationale the Bush administration is using to justify virtually unlimited authority to rewrite the law without ever telling anyone:

At this very Senate hearing, John R. Elwood, the Office of Legal Counsel's deputy assistant attorney general, provided a startling example of the Bush administration's justification for the imperious essence of secret law. As reported in the May 1 New York Times, Elwood "disclosed a previously unpublicized method to cloak government activities."

The Bush administration believes, he said, "that the president could ignore or modify existing executive orders that he and other presidents have issued without disclosing the new interpretation."

Full post as published by Dispatches from the Culture Wars on May 15, 2008 (boomark / email).