Addington, Cheney, and Nixon

I've been reading the New Yorker profile on David Addington, the architect of executive infallibility, and I highly recommend it. Addington is the guy who argued for unlimited 'wartime' powers, and signing statements, and military tribunals, and sactioning torture...and so on. Addington's involvement in all of these makes Mayer's profile a pretty good summary of the administration's war on the Constitution.

It's also a reminder that this war has been going on for a very long time: it's Nixon's war, and Nixon's war never really ended; its partisans just went underground. The chief partisan was Representative Richard Cheney; Addington, just out of high school when Nixon resigned, was a sympathizer. Cheney and Addington hooked up in 1987, when Cheney commissioned the Minority Report on Iran-Contra--a whitewash that accused Congress of overstepping its bounds (“legislative hostage taking”) in exercising oversight of intelligence matters--and Addington helped research it. It was one more battle (kind of a draw, in the end) in the war for executive supremacy.

Throughout it all, Cheney and Addington have kept alive the Nixonian dream. Now they have achieved it. Somewhere below, the sneaky bastard is looking up and smiling.

[That's all, folks]