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CIAO DATE: 12/5/2006
How the Presidency Regained Its Balance
John Yoo
September 2006
Abstract
Accusations of imperial ambitions have flooded the political landscape as President George W. Bush has used his executive powers to improve counterterror strategies, but is Congressional anxiety warranted? Or is a stronger executive branch characteristic of an America at war and symbolic of how the Constitution intended presidential power to be employed?
Five years after 9/11, President Bush has taken his counterterrorism case to the American people. That’s because he has had to. This summer, a plurality of the Supreme Court found, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, that Congress must explicitly approve military commissions to try suspected terrorists. So President Bush has proposed legislation seeking to place the tribunals and other aggressive antiterrorism measures on a sounder footing.