George Will Blasts WH

Today's must-read is George Will's column, not simply for the spectacle of a conservative carving up the Bush administration, but for the cold, professional job he does of it.

Wil has little use for the big-government, imperial presidency, "monarchical doctrine" that the Bush team has adopted.

Keying on the question of whether the post-9/11 authorization for use of military power gave Bush warrantless wire-tapping authority, Will questions both whether future Congresses will ever give such broad authority again and whether it will be sought.

Will:

But, then, perhaps no future president will ask for such congressional involvement in the gravest decision government makes -- going to war. Why would future presidents ask, if the present administration successfully asserts its current doctrine? It is that whenever the nation is at war, the other two branches of government have a radically diminished pertinence to governance, and the president determines what that pertinence shall be.

It is a doctrine especially troubling when the war in question is open-ended and without evident criteria for victory. It puts the president in the position of having vastly magnified powers until such a time as he decides that the war is over.

Anyway, the argument that the [Authorization for Use of Military Force] contained a completely unexpressed congressional intent to empower the president to disregard the FISA regime is risible coming from this administration. It famously opposes those who discover unstated meanings in the Constitution's text and do not strictly construe the language of statutes.

Hey, he's reading my stuff!

The administration's argument about the legality of the NSA program also has been discordant with its argument about the urgency of extending the USA Patriot Act. Many provisions of that act are superfluous if a president's wartime powers are as far-reaching as today's president says they are.

Yep.