Separation of Powers and Federalism

By David J. Bodenhamer, executive director of The Polis Center and a professor of history at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis.

When addressing the Harvard Law School Association in 1913, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. worried that “that fear was translated into doctrines that had no proper place in the Constitution or the common law.”  His corrective was simple: “It seems to be at this time that we need education in the obvious more than the investigation of the obscure.” Although Holmes was speaking about socialism and judges he deemed “naïf and simple-minded,” his admonition seems equally appropriate for our own constitutionally contentious era. Of course, bitter disputes over the meaning of the Constitution are nothing new; they have been a hallmark of public discourse since the 39 signing delegates left Philadelphia. So other than a reminder that controversy and division are common to our history, what “education in the obvious” do we require today?

We too often forget that the Constitution is a revolutionary document. It embodied a fundamental re-scripting of assumptions about government. Chief among them was the invention of popular sovereignty, a conception of the people as both rulers and ruled, or as John Jay noted, “sovereigns without subjects” who “had none to govern but themselves.” This concept was necessary to accommodate another innovation, federalism, which James Madison acknowledged was “unprecedented … It stands by itself.” But it was the only way to resolve the inconsistency of imperium in imperio, a sovereignty within a sovereignty. Over two centuries, these solutions, radical for their time (and for ours), have been instrumental in the development of a more democratic and egalitarian nation because once marginalized and excluded groups demanded to be counted among the people who ruled themselves. And they usually succeeded first in the states, Brandeis’s famed “laboratories of democracy,” before the nation-at-large accepted their claims. But as often happens with revolutionary legacies, there is a counter-narrative to this progressive story. The inventions of popular sovereignty and federalism also have produced great mischief: they have offered a veneer of legitimacy to a variety of “isms”— racism, nativism, separatism, and the like — that acted to deny liberty rather than advance it.

By Cynthia L. Cooper, an award-winning journalist and lawyer, and Elizabeth Holtzman, a lawyer, former prosecutor and former member of Congress who served on the House committee that investigated Watergate.

When President George W. Bush and his team left office, mounds of misdeeds were left to fester. Some of their transgressions in office were so shocking – lying to Congress in order to embroil the nation in war and occupation, illegally wiretapping Americans without warrants, authorizing torture that had been outlawed by U.S. and international law – that he and Vice President Cheney probably should have been impeached and removed from office.

Instead, they completed their terms and sped away. Even though Bush publicly announced in his 2010 memoir that he had personally authorized waterboarding, a recognized form of torture  -- “Damn right,” he is quoted as saying – hardly a peep was heard about seeking accountability. But how can that be? Key to preserving our democracy is the concept that no person is above the law.

In order to ignite a national conversation on the topic, we set out to show how and why the president and vice president should be held accountable – especially, how they can be prosecuted. That meant looking at the available evidence, investigating precisely what laws are implicated and determining, as best as possible, whether a prima facie case could be made. We found enough to make a courageous prosecutor sit up and take notice, although the statute of limitations is ticking in some areas. We found clear problems under laws related to the conspiracy to deceive Congress, foreign intelligence surveillance and U.S. anti-torture laws – each of which needs prosecutorial attention.

Along the way, we found something else disturbing, too: a repeated pattern by which Bush and Cheney took extraordinary efforts to protect themselves from the sting of the law. In Cheating Justice: How Bush and Cheney Attacked the Rule of Law, Plotted to Avoid Prosecution – And What We Can Do About It, we look at both: how the ex-president and vice-president can be held personally accountable, but, also, how they tried to manipulate the system from inside to keep themselves from being held to account.

Perhaps the most startling example of their extraordinary actions was the gutting of the War Crimes Act of 1996.