A powerful Executive Branch

"New York Times magazine contributor Jonathan Mahler talks about what he sees as an imbalance of power between Washington’s legislative and executive branches in his upcoming article about presidential power, called "After the Imperial Presidency."

Mahler interviewed some Senators who expressed a lot of concern about how the separation of powers relationship has really changed between the White House and Congress.

"I’ve spent quite a bit of time with a handful of Senators from both sides of the aisle — the central figures are Warner, Specter, Lindsey Graham and Patrick Leahy — and there is a real concern there that the Congress is no longer a co-equal partner in our government, and certainly one of the defining features of the Bush Administration was this massive expansion of presidential power, and it came very much at the expense of a passive Congress.

"The easiest way to look at it is in terms of the war on terror, and the wire tapping program, the dozens of signing statements in which the President essentially said that he wasn’t obligated to follow the letter of law that he just signed into being."

Mahler quotes Senator Lindsey Graham saying the Bush Administration came up with a pretty aggressive-bordering-on-bizarre theory of inherent authority that had no boundary.

Mahler says there’s a larger problem that allowed for this to happen: "Basically, nowadays, Senators are far more loyal to their Party than they are to the institution and … to their constituents. So you have this problem where Republican Senators … during the Bush Administration, are reluctant to put any pressure on the President because they feel a certain kind of Party loyalty to protect him, and that’s not what Congress is supposed to do. Congress is supposed to check the President, Congress is supposed to prevent the President from overstepping his authority …"

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