WP, Dan Froomkin: King George's White Palace

[DeepModem Mom]

The White Palace
By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Friday, August 18, 2006

It's not just virulent Bush-haters who think the president has been acting like he's the king -- increasingly, it's also the judicial branch.

Yesterday's rebuke of the White House's assertion of nearly unlimited executive power in a time of war came from U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor, who struck down President Bush's warrantless domestic surveillance program as both illegal and unconstitutional.

That, of course, comes hard on the heels of the June 29 Supreme Court decision that struck down Bush's tribunals for terror suspects and reasserted the nation's adherence to the Geneva Conventions...."(T)he idea that there is something fundamentally un-American about some of the basic underpinnings of Bush's war on terror is certainly gaining ground....

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Administration supporters were quick to attack Taylor -- not just professionally, but personally. And yet her ruling in many ways echoes the earlier writing of former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.

In a 2004 Supreme Court decision on presidential power, O'Connor wrote for the majority at the time: "A state of war is not a blank check for the President when it comes to the rights of the Nation's citizens. . . . Whatever power the United States Constitution envisions for the Executive in its exchanges with other nations or with enemy organizations in times of conflict, it most assuredly envisions a role for all three branches when individual liberties are at stake."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/linkset/2005/04/11/LI2005041100879.html