"Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy"

Charlie Savage

This is Charlie Savage of the Boston Globe. Jack Balkin has invited me to introduce my new book, “Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy,” to this audience. “Takeover” goes beyond my reporting last year on the Bush-Cheney administration’s signing statements. It is a comprehensive investigation into the administration’s efforts to expand presidential power. Early readers have also called it a legal history of the administration and an intellectual biography of the vice president, and I would like to think that both descriptions are apt.

The first quarter of the book is a history of executive power, especially from Watergate to the Clinton administration, interwoven with the story of Dick Cheney’s rise and the unfolding of his three-decade agenda of restoring White House authority to what it had been before Nixon’s fall. The remainder of the book is an accounting of how Cheney’s long-term goal organized the administration’s policies and actions from its first day in office, before 9/11, and how the war on terrorism helped throw that pre-existing inclination into overdrive.

"Takeover" is a structured as a narrative, with scenes and characters, and it tells the stories of key figures such as David Addington, John Yoo, Alberto Gonzales, Jack Goldsmith, Jim Haynes, John Roberts, Samuel Alito, and others. I interviewed many former members of the administration legal team, both on the record and on background, and also drew on many memos about executive power written by these lawyers both during the current era and in the past. Some of these memos will be familiar to readers of this blog, but I also uncovered many interesting documents that have never before received public discussion.

The book also provides constitutional analysis written for a non-specialist audience. For example, it discusses at length the invention and evolution of the Unitary Executive Theory, explaining the administration legal team’s use of an enhanced version of the theory to convert “inherent” presidential powers into "exclusive" ones that Congress cannot regulate. It also explores the politics of presidential power, rising secrecy, signing statements, the torture ban fight, and White House efforts to impose greater political control over the military Judge Advocates General, Justice Department lawyers, and other career executive branch officials. Throughout the book, I argue that executive power is not a partisan issue – future Democratic presidents will also be able to draw on these same powers to impose their own agendas unilaterally. (I also made this argument in an essay in the October issue of the Atlantic Monthly and in an interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air earlier this week.)

"Takeover" has received some flattering early praise from commentators and legal scholars from across the political spectrum, including John Dean, George Will, Richard Epstein, Larry Tribe, Mickey Edwards, and Norman Ornstein. Harold Koh, the dean of Yale Law School, called it the “definitive account” of “the systematic effort at constitutional revolution pressed by the Bush-Cheney Administration since September 11.” In the book’s first full-length review last weekend, the San Francisco Chronicle called the book “a masterful work of investigative journalism” that ”deserves to be remembered as one of the key texts of the Bush years.”

My aim in writing this book was to both provide a text that would be interesting and valuable to specialists who have been paying close attention to these issues, such as the readers of this blog, while also reaching a broader readership. More information can be found at CharlieSavage.com. In addition, I have been invited to file daily guest-author postings next week at TPM Café, and may cross-post some of those entries here if they seem geared to a legal audience.

Thanks for reading, and thanks again to Professor Balkin for lending me this platform.