Washington, September 17, 2007 (LPAC)--The vast expansion of Executive power promoted by Dick Cheney and David Addington is likely to result in permanent damage to the Constitutional system of checks & balances, said author and Boston Globe reporter Charlie Savage, who has just written a book on what he calls the "Cheney Project," entitled Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy. Savage was speaking at a Constitution Day event sponsored by the Law Library of Congress and the Constitution Project.

Savage said that the system established by the Founders, ensuring that the Commander-in-Chief powers should be subjected to the rule of law, lasted for 160 years, until Harry Truman embraced the notion of unwritten, inherent powers of the President, and went to war in Korea without Congressional authorization. This has been identified as the beginning of the "imperial presidency," which was then revived by the Nixon Administration. During the Ford Administration, Dick Cheney and Antonin Scalia were outraged by the post-Watergate legal reforms which re-imposed Constitional constraints on the Presidency, and Cheney devoted his career to rolling them back.

Savage has recently noted the divergence between his view, of the permanence of expansions of Executive power at the expense of the other two branches, with that of former Justice Department official Jack Goldsmith, who has also just published a book, The Terror Presidency, which is an account from the inside of how Cheney and Addington ran national security legal policy for the Bush Administration. But Goldsmith argues that Cheney & Co. overreached, triggering a backlash, which resulted in a net weakening of Executive Power, whereas Savage contends that the accretion of such powers is like a "one-way ratchet," becoming permanent precedents.

During the question period, EIR asked Savage about the implications of the Cheney-Addington drive toward dictatorial powers, under conditions of economic crisis and social unrest, such as are emerging now, with the British bank run and the foreclosure crisis in the U.S., which is heading into a crisis worse than the 1930s. Savage said he had not considered it in the terms, but did elaborate on his view that these changes in the constitutional structure will tend to be permanent.

Former Republican Congressman Mickey Edwards (R-OK), also on the panel, pointed out that under conditions of economic distress, people tend to look to a strong-man, and he urged people to read It Can't Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis's 1935 novel about an anti-FDR fascist coup d'etat in the United States.

Edwards concluded by saying that he agreed that the precedents set by Cheney are very dangerous, "if what you're suggesting (about the economic crisis) is true."