The Imperial Presidency

Clintonite Bruce Reed argues in Slate that Democrats need to embrace the Nixon/Bush imperial presidency. Yet isn't part of being a liberal the rejection of tyranny?

It's interesting to read his take on how Dems lost faith in the presidency. According to him, after Nixon,

With nowhere else to turn, Democrats learned to love Congress, a branch of government liberals had largely despised well into the 1960s. Democrats also began to depend on the Supreme Court to check the White House, a dependence that would come back to haunt us as we discovered how losing one would eventually cost us the other.

In the 1970s, Democrats passed a number of laws to rein in the executive branch, from campaign finance to CIA and FBI reforms to the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act that Bush skirted in the current flap over domestic spying. Even with Carter in the White House, Democrats were more comfortable with the role of congressional oversight than with presidential leadership. Our heroes were referees and whistle-blowers like Sam Ervin, John Dean, Judge Sirica, and Woodward and Bernstein, not rogues and swashbucklers in the great American tradition of Teddy Roosevelt and John Kennedy.
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It's a paradox: The party with grand ambitions for government is suspicious of the office that could best achieve them, while the party broadly opposed to the use of government power wants to get its hands on as much of it as possible.

Reed is basically saying: "Fuck your principles and grab that power. Otherwise they're going to abuse it. Once we're in power we'll wield it justly."

I am not so sure about that.

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