Idee fixe.(Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy)(Book review)

Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy, by Charlie Savage (Little, Brown, 416 pp., $25.99)

THE winning side writes the history. For now, Charlie Savage is on the winning side, and considerably more commends him than just that fortuity.

The Boston Globe's Pulitzer Prize-winning legal-affairs correspondent is an energetic reporter and a lucid writer. A graduate of Yale Law School, he possesses an unusual depth in the legal arcana that have come to dominate today's national-security debate. Moreover, his relentless, exquisitely researched new book has won plaudits from both sides of the ideological divide, from Harvard's Laurence Tribe to the estimable George Will.

Savage, nevertheless, has a serious flaw: He is obsessed with Dick Cheney. The vice president is Darth Vader--the root of all evil, and the cartoonish one-size-fits-all explanation behind every controversy, complexities notwithstanding. For now, this is no problem: Savage's bias is shared by the mainstream media, the academic elite, and the resurgent Left. In the short term, its poisonous effect on this accounting will be blithely overlooked. Over time, however, as the heat of our present dementia gives way to less virulent assessments, it will marginalize this book. And that's too bad--because, whether one agrees with it or not (for what it's worth, I disagree with a lot of it), Savage has a case to make, and he makes much of it with considerable persuasive force.

Though he would no doubt reject the designation, the author is a legislative supremacist. In his view, the Framers were so "bent on ensuring" that the presidency they crafted "would not get out of control and become a king" that they vested Congress not merely with competing powers but with elaborate authority to limit presidential prerogatives by regulation. Savage writes:

 
   The Constitution gave Congress the 
   power to pass laws setting all the "rules 
   and regulations" it deemed "necessary 
   and proper" for the execution of presidential 
   powers. The executive branch, in turn, 
   was charged with obeying these rules. 
   If the president did not like the laws, 
   he could veto them, but Congress could 
   override a veto with a supermajority vote. 
   And the Founders specifically took away 
   from the executive the power to take the 
   country to war--a chief provenance of 
   the British king--leaving presidents the 
   power to repel sudden attacks only without 
   first getting the assent of Congress. 
   (Emphasis added.) 

The Framers were also determined, he maintains, to deprive the president of the "prerogative power" enjoyed by the British sovereign to refrain in the public interest from enforcing parliamentary statutes.