How Dick Cheney Reined in Presidential Power

[T]he unilateralism of the early Bush years led Congress to claim ownership over military prerogatives that in previous wars were the president’s. It also led courts to reject claims of presidential wartime authority in decisions that constrained military and intelligence operations. “Looking back,” says Rumsfeld, the unilateral approach “may have contributed to an outcome the administration hoped to avoid: encroachment on the president’s powers.” Rumsfeld’s comment comes from a chapter titled “The Road Not Traveled,” in which he regrets not working more with Congress. Unilateralism, he says, “may not have taken fully into account the broader picture — the complete set of strategic considerations of a president fighting a protracted, unprecedented and unfamiliar war for which he would need sustained domestic and international support.” Bush expressed similar regrets in his memoir, “Decision Points.” “In retrospect,” he wrote, “I probably could have avoided some of the controversy and legal setbacks by seeking legislation on military tribunals, the T.S.P., and the C.I.A. enhanced-interrogation program as soon as they were created.” Cheney has not warmed to this view. “I’m not inclined to make any mea culpas,” he recently said. He has instead deflected the failures of his philosophy by maintaining that Barack Obama embraced his policies. Obama did continue many of the Bush administration counterterrorism policies as they stood in January 2009. But the 2009 policies Obama inherited were not Cheney policies. They were the products of a four-year pushback against those policies, and the theory of power on which they rested, by courts, Congress and the rest of the Bush administration.