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http://prospect.org/article/how-bush-broke-government
DECEMBER 11, 2008
To gain a true sense of Bush's legacy, we survey the systematic and politically motivated ways he undermined the federal government.
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""..."You know how there are all these checks and balances in the government?" says Rick Perlstein, author of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. "Under the Bush administration, all that was turned on its head. When you look at what they did, it's like reading the opposite of the Federalist Papers." Despite the fact that Alexander Hamilton clearly articulated that there should be checks on the president's power -- especially in a time of war -- the Bush administration selectively interpreted the Federalist Papers to claim that Congress has no right to restrict the president. Government lawyers such as John Yoo, who worked in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, went so far as to assert that Hamilton's view of "executive unity" allows for a supercharged executive branch with unlimited power.
Some of Bush's power grabs made national news. Unaccountable military contractors in Iraq and ideological shenanigans at the Justice Department were front-page headlines. However, to gain a true sense of Bush's legacy we must look beyond these individual transgressions and examine how the administration employed politically motivated strategies throughout the federal government -- with devastating results. In other words, to understand what happened to government under the Bush administration, we must look at the methods that were used to break it down.
These methods, which included everything from meddling with scientific research to get the desired results to appointing former lobbyists to watchdog positions, were not, of course, all directly supervised by Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, or other high-level officials. They were often carried out by an array of lower-level officials, many of whom were political appointees, all of whom were operating in the same climate of secrecy and working for a government that condoned and encouraged attempts to expand the reach of the executive branch and its political agenda..."
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