What a 1988 college thesis by the former vice president's daughter tells us about the Bush years

[Are_grits_groceries]

In 1988, while Dick Cheney was Wyoming's sole representative in the House of Representatives, his daughter's senior thesis was quietly published in Colorado Springs. The 125-page treatise argued that, constitutionally and historically, presidents have virtually unchecked powers in war. Thirteen years before her father became vice president, she had symbolically authored the first legal memorandum of the Bush administration, laying out the same arguments that would eventually justify Guantanamo and extraordinary rendition, wiretapping of American citizens, and, broadly, the unitary theory of the executive that shaped the Bush presidency.

Eisenhower Executive Office Building may be bereft of Dick Cheney, but his steadfast efforts to consolidate power around the president have left the scales of power tipped toward the executive. Then there is the force of Cheney's grim, blunt personality, felt even as he attended the inauguration in a wheelchair: His name will stand for the ideas he promoted well into the future, and his daughter's thesis offers an eerily prescient image of the presidency as Cheney believed it should be.
<snip>
Elizabeth Cheney begins her survey at the Constitutional Convention. Contrary to today's middle-school mythology, she tells us, fear of enabling a tyrannical monarch was not foremost in the Founding Fathers' minds. Rather, they did not want to repeat the failure of the Continental Congress' attempts to manage the war for independence. Our constitutional architects, she argues, believed they could not "foresee every possible future use of American armed forces" and, as a result, wanted a commander in chief endowed with great latitude in wartime.
http://www.slate.com/id/2210084/

We were warned. Liz Cheney is her father's daughter in many, many ways.

[Turbineguy]

1. Interesting.

It would seem therefore that the Founding Fathers never envisioned somebody like George W Bush as President.

[rpannier]

2. Fascinating

That is very interesting

Thank you for posting this

[Are_grits_groceries]

3. If you read the book "Angler",

you can see how involved Liz Cheney was in helping her father. She did the scut work, and daddy ran with it.