When George W. Bush was in power and set about creating this vast system and asserting the right to ever more extreme unilateral powers in the name of national security, Democrats were outraged, decrying these measures as an attempt to create an “imperial presidency.”
Seven years later, as one of their own was handed the reins to this extraordinary power, this outrage melted away. Rather than use Obama’s election to dismantle the national security state they had once railed against, Democrats allowed it to expand under Obama’s virtuous hand.
As Democratic leaders and liberal pundits ignored issues of civil liberties and presidential excess, relegating what was once a central critique of Bush into a niche issue, various commentators sounded the alarm over entrusting Obama with such expansive powers. In 2012, speaking about the Obama administration’s drone program, the ACLU’s Hina Shamsi stated:
Anyone willing to trust President Obama with the power to secretly declare an American citizen an enemy of the state and order his extrajudicial killing should ask whether they would be willing to trust the next president with that dangerous power.
A year later, the Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf wrote about the broad national security powers claimed by Bush and Obama, warning that such tools could eventually be misused by a tyrant:
Yes, it could happen here, with enough historical amnesia, carelessness, and bad luck. We’re not special. Our voters won’t always pick good men and women to represent us. Some good women will be corrupted by power, and some bad men will slip through.
As Jeremy Scahill said earlier this year, before Trump had even become the Republian nominee, “It will be very interesting to see, if a Republican wins, how many of the MSNBC pundits and other, you know, so-called liberals — what their position will be on these very same policies.”
The basic argument civil libertarians stressed again and again was simple: You might like the current president. You might even trust him or her. But all leaders eventually transfer power to someone else — someone not likely to share your political beliefs or party affiliation.
As Glenn Greenwald suggested when he questioned if liberals would trust figures like Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich with such powers, the alarm over the latest field of unhinged GOP nominees that comes around every four years should have made progressives particularly attuned to this fact.
Some were. After all, back in 2012, when the prospect of Mitt Romney becoming president was looming, the Obama administration rushed to establish rules around its totally lawless and oversight-free drone program in case he won. After Romney lost the election, these efforts again took a back seat.
Well, the new Republican president is not Mitt Romney. He’s Donald Trump, a thin-skinned narcissist who openly despises protesters and journalists, has suggested mudering the families of terrorists and stealing other countries’ oil, wants to reinstitute torture, and has vowedto “bomb the shit out of ISIS.” Exactly what powers is this man going to have upon taking office?
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