Comes from Gene Healy, commenting on all the talk from right-wingers like John Podhoretz about a possible Hillary Clinton presidency:

What I do know is that if Hillary is the next president, she’ll be able to lay claim to a number of vast, extraconstitutional powers championed by right-wingers like, uh, John Podhoretz. Among those powers is the “inherent executive authority” to wiretap at will and, perhaps, to seize American citizens on American soil and hold them without charges for the duration of the war on terror — in other words, forever.

The ’90s weren’t that long ago. And I remember a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth over misused FBI Files and suspicious IRS audits. Over the last four and a half years, many of the same wailers and gnashers have cheer-led the concentration of unreviewable power in the executive branch, as if George W. Bush would be the last president ever to wield that power. And now, lo and behold, there’s the mistress of Travelgate warming up in the on-deck circle. Join me in a bitter chuckle.

Funny, that didn’t make me feel better.

It goes well beyond war powers. All of this massive government machinery the GOP has assembled over the last six years isn’t going to go away when the Democrats inevitably take the reins. My guess is that’s what it’ll take for them to rediscover their limited government principles.

As for Hillary, I was puzzled by all the people who said in 2004 that they couldn’t cast the divided government vote for John Kerry because they too feared a Hillary Clinton presidency. I wrote at the time that if anything, a second Bush term would make a Hillary presidency more likely, not less, because by the time Bush had served two terms, conservatives and limited government advocates would be dispirited, the left would be hungry and motivated, and everyone in the middle would have Republicans-in-power fatigue. It’s really just about the only scenario under which Hillary could wriggle her way into the White House.

And it’s about to happen.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 14th, 2006 at 5:15 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.