If an administration is at liberty to invoke the state
secrets privilege to prevent litigation from moving forward, thus eliminating
independent judicial review, could not the administration use the privilege to conceal
violations of statutes, treaties, and the Constitution? What
check would then exist for illegal actions by the executive branch?
President Obama's willingness to flex executive power in the wiretap case, and beyond, has come as an unwelcome surprise to supporters who hoped that he might reverse what they saw as a wholesale grab of unauthorized authority by the Bush White House. But the trend towards greater executive power did not begin with George W. Bush, and it would be naive to assume that it would end with him.
In the new book Shadow Elite, a redesign of governing, aided by the rise of executive authority, is seen to be one of the key developments of the late 20th and early 21st centuries that has helped usher forth a new system of power and influence. It's a system in which a small number of ultra-nimble players moving seamlessly among roles in government, business, think tanks, and media, pursue their own agendas, at the expense of democracy, transparency, peace and accountability.
Historical background
A vision of a streamlined state burst onto the public stage in the United States and the United Kingdom in the early 1980s, with Ronald Reagan and his ideological soul mate, Margaret Thatcher, leading the rhetorical charge. Reagan campaigned against "big government" and presided over an age of deregulation, relaxing constraints on industry, while Thatcher pressed to privatize the economy by selling government-owned enterprises. The redesign of governing had its origins in these policy reforms (especially those dealing with government itself), as well as in expanded executive power, which often was necessary to implement this particular kind of reform.
The "Reagan revolution" sanctified the practice of contracting out government services, ostensibly to control costs, while letting governing entities concentrate on their central mission. And the trend is now so entrenched that it transcends party, with even President Clinton and Vice President Gore declaring they would "Reinvent Government." The result was that a host of non-governmental players were increasingly doing the government's work, often overshadowing government bureaucracy, which began to look like Swiss cheese: full of holes -- a condition ideal for a new kind of power broker wanting to plug into those holes.
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