Imperial.presidency Quotes

In all, the future secretary of defense and wartime vice president[, Dick Cheney,] would receive five deferments during the Vietnam War, protecting him from service during his draft-eligible years.

In its broadest sense, the scandal of Watergate arose from the tumultuous and destabilizing trends of the 1960s, especially the war in Vietnam and the deviousness and power-grabbing associated with the rise of an imperial presidency.2

There was at least one exception to this description of the [Energy Task Force] papers as uninteresting. One document later obtained by Judicial Watch showed that Cheney's energy task force was studying Iraqi oil fields, and the companies that had drilling rights on them, as early as March 2001, two years before the invasion of Iraq.

According to James Mann's Rise of the Vulcans, once a year in the 1980s, the Reagan administration flew Cheney to a secret bunker to practice rebuilding the government if the Soviets destroyed Washington. Cheney's role, Mann reported, was to use his White House chief of staff experience to run the government in the name of any surviving cabinet member who made it to the bunker. The Reagan plan ignored the Presidential Succession Act, a 1947 law that put two top congressional leaders higher in the line of succession than cabinet secretaries. The program also made no plan for reconstituting Congress, because "it would be easier to operate without them," a participant told Mann.

We have noted that corruption appears to visit the White House in fifty-year cycles. This suggests that exposure and retribution inoculate the Presidency against its latent criminal impulses for about half a century. Around the year 2023 the American people would be well advised to go on the alert and start nailing down everything in sight.

By the seventh year of the Bush-Cheney presidency, Bush had attached signing statements to about 150 bills enacted since he took office, challenging the constitutionality of well over 1,100 separate sections in the legislation. By contrast, all previous presidents in American history combined had used signing statements to challenge the constitutionality of about 600 sections of bills, according to historical data compiled by Christopher Kelley, a Miami University of Ohio political science professor who was one of the first to study signing statements.

individuals exist to serve the purposes of the secular state and an imperial president. The implied warning to Christians is: Obey or find work elsewhere. But a deeper agenda may be that Obama is using a backhanded maneuver to try and put religious institutions out of business, and quiet Christians. For this is the method used in communist countries to limit religion; by putting extremely difficult restrictions on them. In a draft of a Communist Confession of Faith, (the original name for the Manifesto of the Communist Party) it says “communism is that stage of historical development which makes all existing religions superfluous and supersedes them.” 73And the Manifesto says, “There

The Court, in its zeal to rebuke the Presidency, almost reversed Lincoln’s analogy about giving a limb to save a life: “A country preserved at the sacrifice of all the cardinal principles of liberty, is not worth the cost of preserving.

A further reason for the indestructibility of the Presidency lies in the psychology of mass democracy. Once again Tocqueville provides the text. “Our contemporaries,” he wrote, “are constantly excited by two conflicting passions: they want to be led, and they wish to remain free....By this system the people shake off their state of dependency just long enough to select their master and then relapse into it again.

Are we still a self-determining people resistant to the freedom-devouring proclivities of an imperial presidency?

Welcome to the United States-Hamelin. A gravely ill Imperial President governs the land. His name is Pied-piper. I am an immigrant and his most subversive subject.

Discussions around the President, Reedy concluded, were “really monologues in which one man is getting reflections of what he sends out.

The single-man Presidency, with the right man as President, had its uses; and historically Americans had as often as not chosen the right man.

The rule of law is the enemy of the powerful.