BAAS Keynote Speech A Passion for Democracy: Proximity to Power and the Sovereign Immunity Test

Abstract

In the run-up to the 2004 presidential election, a Bush administration official memorably explained to New York Times reporter Ron Suskind, “when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality … we'll act again … We're history's actors … and you … will be left to … study what we do.” This comment was taken both as the administration's assessment of the intellectual left, and as a window into Bush's executive philosophy. Then many believed then that a different President – a liberal or progressive President – would renounce such unilateralism. But these arguments didn't evidence the peculiarity of George W. Bush's Machtpolitik. Rather, they draw on a deep and relatively unnoticed tradition in US political history and government, of the ever more aggressive executive expansion of presidential powers. That expansion has come through the ambitions, machinations, and moxie of individual Presidents – some of them impressively gifted leaders. It has also come through the active and passive consent of citizens, Congress, and the Supreme Court. The President has come to symbolize both our democratic process and our national power: citizens see him simultaneously as democracy's heart and its avenging sword. That trust, trained into US citizens from our earliest days in school, reinforced by popular culture and by the media, makes citizens want to give the President more power, regardless of the Constitutional checks and balances we also learn to treasure as schoolchildren. Over time, this accumulating consent to ever-increasing presidential power means that Presidents are free to act – even in ways that upset the Constitution's balance of power – and that citizens by and large approve, and those who don't are left studying what they did.