The Dictator

The Bush administration is a dictatorship. This president has assumed the power to re-write the laws Congress sends to his desk, and has reduced the legislature to a cipher, just as Augustus, the first Roman emperor, did with the Roman Senate. His justification for subverting the Constitution and establishing what he and the architects of the dictatorship refer to as the "unitary executive" is 9/11.

Two important articles analyzing the workings and progress of the dictatorship have recently appeared in high-profile publications. Elizabeth Drew's "Power Grab" ran in the New York Review of Books on June 22, and is mainly a catalogue of the extent and impact of the so-called "signing statements" by which Bush alters or announces his intent to ignore legislation which he signs, then amends. In addition Drew speculates about the ways in which old laws may have been altered or destroyed by the dictatorship.

She also names Vice-President Cheney and, most particularly, Cheney's chief of staff, David Addington as the principal and most important architects of the dictatorial policy. Addington, of whom many Americans have never heard, is probably the most influential spokesman within the administration pushing for executive usurpation of Congressional powers and the establishment of one-man rule, even though he is not directly answerable to the president.

Not surprisingly, then, Addington is the primary subject of Jane Mayer's July 3 New Yorker article "The Hidden Power", which analyzes the relationships of power within the administration and focuses on Addington's singular role.

Of course, as both writers point out, the attempt to establish a military dictatorship as the government of the former democratic republic of the United States would have come to nought if Congress had not rolled over and accepted the administration's blatant and bald-faced usurpation of the legislative function.