On November 19, a web advertisement placed on the National Review Online website for the book Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy by Boston Globe reporter Charlie Savage, published by Little, Brown & Co. (September 2007), asked: “Hillary Clinton: the most powerful president in American history... Will this be the surprise legacy of the Bush-Cheney years?” But Savage has not alleged -- either in the book or during discussions of it -- that Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (NY) would use the expanded powers that the next president will inherit as a result of the precedents established under the Bush administration or that she would attempt to expand presidential power even further.

Below are the three frames in the animated advertisement:

By contrast, the book jacket says nothing about Clinton:

In 1789, the Founding Fathers came up with a system of checks and balances to keep kingly powers out of the hands of American presidents. But in the 1970s and '80s, a faction of Republican loyalists, outraged by the fall of the imperial presidency after Watergate and the Vietnam War, abandoned conservatives' traditional suspicion of concentrated government power. These men hatched a plot that would allow the White House to return to, or even surpass, the virtually unchecked powers that Richard Nixon had briefly tried to wield. Congress would be defanged, and the commander in chief would be able to assert a unilateral dominance both at home and abroad.

Today, this plot is coming to fruition. As Takeover reveals, the Bush-Cheney administration has succeeded in seizing vast powers for the presidency by throwing off many of the restraints placed upon it by Congress, the courts, and the Constitution. Charlie Savage's timely book unveils the secret machinations behind the headlines, explaining the links between warrantless wiretapping and President Bush's Supreme Court nominees, between the unprecedented politicization of the Justice Department and the torture debate, between the White House's use of “signing statements” to assert a right to defy new laws and its efforts to impose greater control over career military JAG lawyers, and between the secrecy surrounding Vice President Cheney's energy task force and the holding of U.S. citizens without trial as “enemy combatants.” It tells, for the first time, the full story of a hidden agenda three decades in the making, laying out how a group of true believers undertook to establish monarchical executive powers that, in the words of one conservative critic, “will lie around like a loaded weapon,” ready to be picked up by any future president -- liberal or conservative.

Brilliantly reported and deftly told, Takeover is a searing investigation into how the constitutional balance of our democracy is in danger of being permanently altered. For anyone who cares about America's past, present, and future, it is essential reading.

The index to Takeover identifies that Clinton is mentioned on pages 64, 91-92, 161, 176, 204, and 329. Below are those references to Clinton.

From pages 63-64 of Takeover:

The tenure of President Clinton, like that of Carter before him, showed that presidential power is not a partisan issue. As the Clinton-Gore administration sought to advance its generally liberal policy agenda -- especially after conservative Republicans retook Congress in 1995 -- the White House used the tools of unilateral presidential power it inherited from Republican administrations. As one scholar has written, Clinton's legal team was “relatively cautious in its assertion of executive power, with a little more respect for congressional prerogatives, but it still mostly embraced the Reagan and Bush administrations' views” of its rightful powers.

Early in his presidency, Clinton refused to release documents showing who had attended meetings of First Lady Hillary Clinton's task force on reforming the nation's health-care system. The move presaged a later fight by Vice President Cheney to keep his similar energy task force records secret. But unlike Cheney, Clinton eventually reversed course and agreed to release the names. Clinton also reversed a Reagan-Bush clampdown on the Freedom of Information Act, ordering government agencies to comply with requests by the public for documents if possible. And he ordered a massive review of classified documents, resulting in the release to historians of numerous government files.

While Clinton never invoked the Unitary Executive Theory as justification for seizing greater control over the permanent government, he did advance some of its principles in modest ways.

From pages 91-92 of Takeover:

As Cheney and the GAO dug in their heels, the growing fight began to attract greater media attention. In May, Newsweek ran an article entitled “Big Energy at the Table” that caught the eye of Chris Farrell, the director of investigations and research at a conservative government watchdog group called Judicial Watch. The group, which was partially funded by the conservative billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, had made a name for itself during the 1990s by launching lawsuit after lawsuit against the Clinton administration. Farrell, a former army counterintelligence agent who had hunted spies in Europe during the Cold War, had joined Judicial Watch in 1999. His first assignment had been to fly down to Little Rock, Arkansas, to interview former Clinton administration officials about whether the White House had abused its access to FBI files to dig up dirt on Republicans. When Farrell read the Newsweek article, the whole secret process struck him as no different from what Hillary Rodham Clinton had tried to do when her health-care policy task force had met behind closed doors eight years earlier. Conservatives had been outraged at the Clinton administrations' secrecy during the health-care fight, yet here the same thing was happening.

“The government can't operate in secret,” Farrell later explained. “They are answerable to the people. There are appropriate times for secrecy on military and intelligence matters, but the notion that national policy on a matter like energy or health care can be developed in secret is offensive and counter to the Constitution.”

Sitting around a circular glass table in the seventh-floor conference room at Judicial Watch's headquarters, some six blocks south of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum on the National Mall, Farrell and the other top leaders debated about whether they ought to move in. Judicial Watch's chairman, Larry Klayman, and its president, Thomas Fitton, had become widely viewed as GOP hatchet men because of their aggressive pursuit of the Clinton administration. But they all agreed that the secrecy surrounding Cheney's energy task force was repugnant to core conservative principles, as they saw them.

Farrell drafted a letter to Cheney that went out on June 25, demanding access to the energy task force's records. Their letter noted that the rules were very clear on such matters: If the executive branch chooses to solicit outside advice when writing policy, the Federal Advisory Committee Act requires the government to make such discussions open to public scrutiny. “Judicial Watch respectfully requests that, in light of the questionable legal and ethical practices, negative publicity, and public outrage surrounding Hillary Rodham Clinton's 1994 national health-care policy development group, you direct the [energy task force] to abide by the FACA,” they wrote, adding that such openness “will instill public trust and confidence in the operations of the [task force] and insure that the national policy is formulated, discussed, and acted upon in a manner consistent with the best traditions of our Constitutional Republic.”

The letter was written on Judicial Watch's letterhead, emblazoned with the pointed motto it had used as a weapons against the Clinton administration for the previous five years: “Because no one is above the law!”

From page 161 of Takeover:

The district court judge who was to decide the case, Emmet Sullivan, had impeccable bipartisan credentials. He had been appointed to a District of Columbia judgeship by President Reagan, elevated to a higher DC court by President George H. W. Bush, and then elevated again to the federal bench by President Clinton. On August 2, 2002, Sullivan announced his decision. If Cheney wanted the case dismissed, the judge said, the White House first had to show him documents from the task force. This could be done privately in his chambers, and no one else need ever know the contents of the documents. But, citing the Clinton health-care task force precedent, Sullivan said that he needed to examine the records to see how much the energy company lobbyists and executives had participated in its work. “It is not enough to say, 'This request in unconstitutional,' ” Sullivan told Cheney's lawyers. “I need to know what the basis is.”

Sullivan gave the White House one month to begin bringing records to his chamber. That night, as Judicial Watch's Chris Farrell drove home along the George Washington Memorial Parkway in his blue 1994 Geo Prizm, he was jubilant.

From page 176 of Takeover:

Five days after the FBI arrested Lawrence Franklin, on May 10, 2005, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia handed down a decision that ended the second energy task force papers case. During oral arguments the previous January, several judges had indicated that they read the Supreme Court's ruling -- insisting that they take a second look at the case using a much more pro-White House standard -- as meaning that the higher justices did not want the judiciary to get further entangled in a showdown with the executive branch. The appeals court got the message loud and clear. It issued an 8-0 ruling that Cheney need not disclose the energy task force records to the federal district judge after all. And because, without access to such records, the court had no evidence that the lobbyists had cast a vote during the group's deliberations, they said the energy task force was not covered by the Federal Advisory Commission Act. With the bang of a gavel, they dismissed the case.

The decision relied entirely upon the assertion of two Cheney aides that the lobbyists had not cast any votes, a claim no judge ever verified by looking at the records. The court's ruling also dismissed arguments that “influential participation” by outsiders made them de facto members of the task force whether or not they cast votes, rejecting the standard the same court had used a decade earlier to force Hillary Rodham Clinton to disclose her health-care task force files.

The decision, said Judicial Watch's Chris Farrell, left the 1973 open-government law “a hollow shell.” David Bookbinder, the Sierra Club's lead attorney on the case, told reporters that the outcome was a double blow: “As a policy matter, we see the Bush administration has succeeded in its efforts to keep secret how industry crafted the administration's energy policy. As a legal matter, it's a defeat for efforts to have open government and for the public to know how their elected officials are conducting business.”

From page 204 of Takeover:

Other conservative luminaries who publicly broke with the White House over its legal claims that month included syndicated columnist George F. Will, who denounced the administration's arguments as both “risible” and a “monarchical doctrine” that was “refuted by the plain text of the Constitution.” David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, said the legal powers claimed by the White House could be used to justify anything: “Their argument is extremely dangerous. . . . The American system was set up on the assumption that you can't rely on the good will of people with power.” Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform said, “There is no excuse for violating the rule of law.” Larry Pratt, executive director of Gun Owners of America, worried that the program created a risk that government surveillance would be used against the political opponents of whoever was in power. “Some liberals think of gun owners as terrorists,” he said. In the same way, Paul M. Weyrich of the conservative Free Congress Foundation said that even strong Bush supporters should consider the long-term implications of giving the White House the ability to ignore laws, explaining, “My criteria for judging this stuff is what would a President Hillary do with these powers.” And Bruce Fein, a former Justice Department official under President Reagan, said that those siding with the administration had “a view that would cause the Founding Fathers to weep. The real conservatives are the ones who treasure the original understanding of the Constitution, and clearly this is inconsistent with the separation of powers.”

From page 329 of Takeover:

With that in mind, some political activists have begun to push for presidential power to be a major focus of the 2008 election -- a drive to get presidential candidates to say what limits on the powers of their office they would obey before voters decide whom to entrust with the tremendous authority of the White House. This emerging drive cuts across ideological lines. In the spring of 2007, for example, a group of prominent Washington conservatives came together to form a new group, the American Freedom Agenda, which lobbied debate moderators to ask questions about executive power and which asked candidates to sign a ten-point pledge promising to take a restrained attitude toward executive power if elected. One of the founders, the direct-mail pioneer Richard Viguerie, said that conservative critics of the Bush-Cheney approach to executive power had had a difficult time getting their “constitutionalist” message across in recent years because Republicans controlled the government. But with everything up for grabs in 2008, he said, the time was ripe for the “traditional Barry Goldwater conservative,” which he described as a conservative who believes in limited government and preserving checks and balances on those who wield power, to regain a voice.

“As it becomes more and more clear that Hillary Clinton could be the president of the United States, that is going to get a lot of conservatives' attention in a way this hasn't done before in recent years,” Viguerie predicted.

Yet even if the victor in the 2008 presidential election declines to make use of the aggrandized executive powers established by the Bush-Cheney administration, in the long run such forbearance might make little difference. The accretion of presidential power, history has shown, often acts like a one-way ratchet: It can be increased far more easily than it can be reduced. The annals of American history are now filled with new precedents in which a White House has claimed the power to bypass laws and then acted upon that claim, especially in matters of national security. The zone of secrecy surrounding the executive branch has been dramatically widened. The Supreme Court has been sharply tilted toward a sympathetic view of executive power, and the White House's political control of the permanent government has been dramatically expanded.

Further, in several discussions of the book, Savage has rarely mentioned Clinton and has not asserted that she would be more likely to expand presidential power more than any other presidential candidate. In early September, Savage wrote five blog entries about his book on the website TPM Cafe. None mentioned Hillary Clinton. On October 12, Savage discussed his book on the radio program Democracy Now!, also without mentioning Hillary Clinton.

In a September 30 online discussion about his book at the blog Firedoglake, Savage responded to a question about “the points you want us to see most emphatically” and did not mention Hillary Clinton:

The big picture of the book is to explain, in great detail and in a readable narrative, the myriad ways in which the Bush-Cheney administration has expanded presidential power. ... . It's not any one thing, so much as the accumulation of everything that is staggering to grasp. Too often these controversies have been discussed in isolation, without the broader context of how they fit into the full agenda, and where that agenda is coming from.

The other major contribution of the book, I hope, is to answer that second question -- motivation.

Later in the Firedoglake chat, Savage responded to a question about possible “intimidation” from the “right wing” and noted Clinton's “failure to keep her health care task force secret” before stating that “presidential power is not a partisan issue:”

I have also tried very hard to emphasize that this issue -- the concentration of more powers into fewer hands -- is above politics. The next president will inherit the arsenal this administration has developed, and that president could be Hillary Clinton. One needs only look at Hillary's failure to keep her health care task force secret in 1993-94, and Cheney's success in keeping his energy task force secret, thereby leaving behind a precedent that will allow all future White Houses to keep such work secret, to see that presidential power is not a partisan issue.

Finally, Savage later answered a specific question about Clinton -- “Will President HRC prove to be imperial?” -- to which he replied:

It will be very interesting to watch the next president, especially if he/she is a Democrat, and what they do with these powers he/she will inherit. If he/she does exercise these powers for his/her own ends, it will do much to further embed these principles into our law going forward. On the other hand, even if he/she takes a more mainstream view -- for example, by asking Congress to change the rules if he/she thinks the rules are bad, rather than asserting a right to ignore the rules at his/her own discretion -- in the long run it may make little difference. These actions are now precedents, and nothing is to prevent some other president 10, 20, 50 years from now from invoking them. Their Office of Legal Counsel will opine that it is well established that a president can do X, since back at the early 21st Century a president did do X, and that shows it can be done.

That said, I think all the major presidential candidates of both parties should be forced to answer detailed questions about what their views on presidential power are, and what limits -- if any -- they would respect on their own authority if voters entrust one of them with the White House. Debate moderators and my fellow journalists on the campaign trail should not let them keep their silence about this before Election Day.

Everyone likes power and thinks that they can be trusted to do the right thing with it.