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cyn--that's in a sense the problem---the administration *can* get away with this because the possibility is itself allowed for in the context of the "checks and balances" of the system.
and like dc says, the advantage necessarily accrues to the "unitary" executive in this context because the executive can "act" where congress has to deliberate--and the judicary is only really involved at a further remove when cases work their way through the system.
so the problem seems to me to be this structural feature of the american constitutional system as enframed by a particular (neocon) ideology and acted upon by cheney/addington and the neocon cabal within the bush administration.
at one level, this seems to me to be the logical extension of the doctrine of the national security state itself---which was built around these same types of assumptions concerning the need for manly unified swift action --as over against time-consuming pusillanimous deliberative process. but in the late 1940s, this doctrine was developed as a response to stalinism, and was basically understood as a necessary counter-dictatorship that could respond to the actions of a dictatorship.
so in this case, it appears that the cheney-addington crew have made the us into a kind of terrorist state so as to be able to respond to "terrorism"...
and i think the motivations are to some extent what i thought they were for the iraq war--prolonging a cold-war type arrangement, using nationalism to justify a very reactionary political order, all in the interests of maintaining conservatism in the way it had been since world war 2--and since the 1970s in particular.
but the unitary executive doctrine seems to go beyond that into something else that i'm not sure about--i think it really is a theory of dictatorship dressed in american pseudo-democratic language, and is a manifestation of a weakness in the republican form of government (as over against a more democratic form)--which in the historical sense you see in the drift of plato from the republic to the laws, which is a very reactionary text in which the show of the republic is run by "night committees."
what i'm not sure about is the motivation. it seems then to be about power for its own sake...but sometimes i am not sure that's adequate.
a constitutional crisis comes about when the actions of a particular government reveals design problems in the framework itself. like i said, in a more rigid type of system, we'd be in a crisis now. and like i said, i'm not sure that the inability of the american system to register crisis is a good thing at all.
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dc--thanks...
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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