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David Greenberg's examination of how Bush continues the consolidation of White House power at the expense of cabinet government.
Summary: While this trend goes back before 1800, Bush has now marginalized even three of the four traditionally influential post: State, Defense, Justice and Treasury. (shouldn't take you long to guess which of these four managed to wield real power in policy).
Excerpt below the fold:
For many years now, the fabled "Cabinet meeting" has fallen on hard times. Almost every president since FDR entered office vowing to restore "Cabinet government"; almost every one convened the body with diminishing frequency as his term progressed. (The last president to convene Cabinet meetings regularly was Eisenhower, who ceded substantial authority to his Cabinet on domestic issues because he himself didn't care much about them.) "You get a seat at the table," Berkeley political scientist Nelson Polsby says of Cabinet chiefs, "but the table doesn't get used."
So, what's so new about Bush's neglect of the Cabinet? Perhaps that it jumped the firewall that historically protected the "big four" positions--State, Defense, Treasury, and Justice--from marginality. Throughout Bush's first term, many of these traditional power centers, notably Powell at State and Paul O'Neill and John Snow at Treasury, lost their customary influence to the White House, in particular to Vice President Dick Cheney. In the past, individual secretaries of state or treasury occasionally found themselves on the outs, but no other administration made tax cuts and war its signature issues while relying so little on those key officers. And even John Ashcroft at Justice, though he maintained a high profile, never insinuated himself into Bush's inner councils. Of the big four, only Donald Rumsfeld proved to be an influential policymaker alongside Cheney.
During the late 1960s and early 1970s, with the out-of-control administrations of Johnson and Nixon, Americans began to worry about the growth of presidential power. The Cabinet briefly regained some luster as an important check on White House clout. Under Nixon, after all, Attorney General Elliot Richardson had heroically refused to fire the Watergate special prosecutor, prompting the Saturday Night Massacre that hastened Nixon's fall. Defense Secretary James Schlesinger famously ordered the military not to obey Nixon should he try to use armed force to stay in power after being impeached. But one White House veteran, commenting a few years later on the view that presidential power needed such restraints, strongly disagreed with the prevailing wisdom. "That's what the press would like you to think, and many academics, but it wasn't the organizational system that caused Watergate," the official told political scientist Anthony J. Bennett. "... I believe that if you have cabinet government, you have chaos."
The speaker was Dick Cheney.