Gene Healy and Tim Lynch have a blistering paper out today about President Bush’s contempt for the U.S Constitution. They pull no punches. From the executive summary:

Unfortunately, far from defending the Constitution, President Bush has repeatedly sought to strip out the limits the document places on federal power. In its official legal briefs and public actions, the Bush administration has advanced a view of federal power that is astonishingly broad, a view that includes

a federal government empowered to regulate core political speech–and restrict it greatly when it counts the most: in the days before a federal election;

a president who cannot be restrained, through validly enacted statutes, from pursuing any tactic he believes to be effective in the war on terror;

a president who has the inherent constitutional authority to designate American citizens suspected of terrorist activity as “enemy combatants,” strip them of any constitutional protection, and lock them up without charges for the duration of the war on terror– in other words, perhaps forever; and

a federal government with the power to supervise virtually every aspect of American life, from kindergarten, to marriage, to the grave.

President Bush’s constitutional vision is, in short, sharply at odds with the text, history, and structure of our Constitution, which authorizes a government of limited powers.

Gene wrote a piece on similar themes for the latest issue of Cato Policy Report.

One of the reasons I love working at Cato is that the organization doesn’t shill for any political party. Both Tim and Gene wrote similar (and similarly scathing) critiques of President Clinton’s constitutional record.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 1st, 2006 at 12:57 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.