Stop saying Obama is just like Bush!

There is one thing that the right-wing and the far-left in this country agree on these days: President Barack Obama is much like President Bush in fighting the war on terror. Whatever your disagreement with Obama may be--and I have many, particularly on the so-called doctrine of prolonged detention--to compare his approach to Bush's is not only patently false, but it betrays a breathtaking lack of understanding of a long-running contest over the meaning of the Constitution.

From the internal memos, memoirs, and transcripts from the Bush administration--leaked in interviews, books, and Bush himself--it has become clear that Bush's approach to fighting terrorism was guided by one principle: unitary executive. The greatest advocate of this principle was of course Vice President Dick Cheney and his legal adviser David Addington who believed that at times of war (actually at all times, but particularly during a war), the President of the United States had an unchecked authority to abrogate any law the Congress made if the protection of the American people was the motivating factor of his decisions. This is the American version of Louis XIV's infamous creed: "L'etat, c'est moi." The Cheney crowd consisted of angry right-wingers who still felt slighted by the Congressional oversight of the Presidency instituted after the Watergate fiasco. They believed that in the aftermath of Watergate, the Presidency had made way too many concessions to Congress. The main real-life repercussion of this was the infamous "enemy combatant" doctrine.

According to the "enemy combatant" doctrine, the President of the United States had an unchecked, oversight-free, Constitutional power to declare any single human being on the planet--even if he or she was a US citizen--to be an enemy combatant and as such, could be imprisoned indefinitely as long as the "war on terror" goes on. The example of this was of course the case of the so-called "dirty bomber" Jose Padilla who was held for years in an army brig, and Al-Massari, who was held in isolation until this year when President Obama transferred him to a federal court where he plead guilty and got a long-prison term.

Obama's right-wing detractors and his supposedly betrayed left-wing critics lament his supposed continuation of Bush's policies, pointing to his doctrine of "preventive detention" and his continuation of military tribunals, to argue that other than being an eloquent defender of the Constitution, Obama is doing pretty much the same amount of damage to it as Bush had done, and is continuing his policy. FALSE!

The Obama approach to terrorism is guided by the respect for the Constitution. In every instance where he has to judge how to approach fighting terrorism, he has bent over backwards to stay as true to the Constitution as possible, and more importantly, to completely ABROGATE THE IDEOLOGY OF UNITARY EXECUTIVE! The last point is key to understanding how Obama's approach differs from Bush's. In every matter--from detaining terror suspects, to trying them, to attacking other countries in self-defense--President Obama has disputed the idea of unitary Executive. Instead, he has delegated many of the powers Bush claimed for himself to the Congress. For example, in the so-called preventive detention policy, Obama has set out clear and multi-layered oversight by the US Congress and the courts so that no one single man or a woman--even if they are the President of the US--can pass such profound judgment on the life of a human being. The same rule follows in military tribunals--while they are still not the same as our civil courts, they will be under the oversight of courts and many constitutional obligations are still in effect--such as the prohibition against torture-extracted evidence and the right to habeas corpus for the detainees.

Thus, Obama's complete abandonment of the term "war on terror," is more than a semantic exercise. It shows Obama's contempt for Bush's view of "unitary executive." By avoiding this term, Obama is also giving up the claim of the US Executive to some extraordinary "war" powers. In fact, this is exactly what many of us on the left wanted from the President: to treat our efforts to protect the US from terrorists more as a legal battle, than a war which would automatically authorize the President to use some unconstitutional powers. The closure of the GITMO, which will happen by January 2010, will be a powerfully symbolic, and also practical, proof of President Obama's continuing dismantling of Bush's illegal unitary executive doctrine.

Sometimes I think some on the left are unable or unwilling--or both--to recognize a good thing while we are experiencing it. And Obama's Presidency has definitely been a great thing for this country. Again, it is a healthy thing that many of us still disagree on him on many issues-including the preventive detention-but to argue that he is the same as Bush, is simply not true!