It sits in the back of my head and, as has become common these days, the internet comes to the rescue. Once, I remembered, I read a very compelling article in Time magazine about how what came to be known as the imperial presidency had subverted the republic our founders established. I was young when I read this: I knew that. I remembered the cover of that edition of Time had photographs of the nobodies in Congress who pretended to be still be significant despite the President--I was sure it was Nixon--having decided they were no longer of any use and, given the politics of the time, could be safely ignored.

Every so often I would think of this article. Now, of course, I could find it.


and the date of the issue, January 15, 1973 (with the cover as I remembered it) explained why I had the patience to read a whole Time magazine article. I was, I know now, on my way to Washington, D.C. to "cover" the protest of Nixon's second inauguration for the radio station at the college I was then attending. I was a serious journalist, of course, and needed to study the issues and Time magazine seemed to be a good place to start, I guess.

But, thanks to the internet, the article, re-read from a platform thirty-six years in its future, shocked me for a second time, more from sadness than outrage. Without violating what I understand the rules to be, I can quote at least this much, while urging that the old, molded thing be read in its sickening entirety:

THE U.S. is facing a constitutional crisis. That branch of Government that most closely represents the people is not yet broken, but it is bent and in danger of snapping. A Congress intended by the framers of the Constitution to be the nation's supreme policy setter, lawmaker and reflector of the collective will has been forfeiting its powers for years. Now a President in the aftermath of a landslide seems intent upon further subordinating it and establishing the White House ever more firmly as the center of federal power.

Whatever the merits of Richard Nixon's intentions in trying to hold down federal spending or seeking peace in Viet Nam in his own way, his actions represent, among other things, a serious challenge to Congress as an institution. In Viet Nam, he has mined harbors and turned the massive bombing on and off like a spigot with no advance consultation with Congress and with explanation, if at all, only after the fact. He has vetoed congressional appropriations, which is his right. But he has also ignored Congress when it over rode his veto, refusing to spend the money appropriated--which is not his clear right. He has used a brief recess of Congress to "pocket veto" bills, extending a power intended only as an end-of-session action. Even as he centralizes more powers of the Executive Branch within his White House staff, he has drawn a cloak of Executive privilege around his men, refusing to allow key decision makers to be questioned by congressional committees. The trend could be ominous for the future of representative government.

Within a year and three quarters the President who won with that landslide had resigned. The chief of staff to the new President was named Donald Rumsfeld, and his deputy was Dick Cheney. The rest is, well, history.

While the equivalent of the Daily Kos and TPM communities may have congratulated ourselves in August, 1974 when Nixon finally got up and left, some of us had a sinking feeling that Congress thought it had done its job. The new President said so: "Our Constitution works. Our nation endures" some said in celebrating the end of what the new President called "our long national nightmare."

I was not so sure. The nation definitely endured, but Congress, it seemed to me, did nothing to help that. By late 1973 at the very latest, Nixon's crimes against the Constitution were well known. John Dean, the former White House counsel, had testified on national television about conversations with the President that made any case that he was not complicit in an attempt to subvert the 1972 election and to spy on what the White House called its "enemies" to be tenuous at best. He said, to some amount of ridicule among the FOX News types of the day, that he told the President that there was a cancer on the presidency, but when it turned out that the White House tape recorded many of the President's conversations and that Dean had in fact said exactly what he claimed, even the Rush Limbaughs of the day knew that there was a problem.

Yet, there he sat. Day after day. He was still the President. He was not going to resign and nobody was going to make him. The question of the previous spring: what did the President know and when did he know it, was almost foolishness, yet, we were told "everyone" did what Nixon did, and only he was caught. When the Special Prosecutor he was forced to appoint tried to subpoena the tapes, Nixon ordered the Attorney General to fire him. The Attorney General, who was confirmed only on his promise that he would appoint a special prosecutor, resigned, as did his deputy. The Solicitor General, the third in charge of the Justice Department (a fellow named Robert Bork-whaddya know) did the evil President's bidding. It was a Saturday night (the press called it the "Saturday night massacre"). I sat in the college radio station expecting the wire service ticker we had in our teeny newsroom would report troops in the capital. I was excited but a little bit scared.

But still the guy sat there. The House began impeachment proceedings. They went on and on, shockingly dull almost, even though it was the stuff of novels. Nothing. He would not resign.

The new Special Prosecutor had essentially adopted the same grand jury subpoena his predecessor had been fired for issuing (despite a presidential "compromise" under which the oldest person anyone had ever seen sitting in the Congress would decide what the trial court could receive). The Supreme Court, in my favorite name for any case in history, United States v. Nixon, unanimously held that the executive privilege asserted by the President was an inadequate basis to quash the subpoena. (We now know--we did not then--that the President's chief of staff, a retired U.S. Army general, had considered whether the President had to obey the Court's mandate but, coming months after the Saturday night massacre which had brought the country to the edge of anarchy, wisely decided against what would have amounted to a coup d'etat.)

One of the conversations recorded on one of the tapes at issue was of the President, shortly after the burglary of the offices of the Democratic Committee during the pre-election period in 1972, dictating a false story the CIA director should tell the FBI director, to convince the FBI not to investigate. With this tape, the last defenders of the President had to give it up and they trooped to the White House with, among others Senator Barry Goldwater, never an admirer of Nixon's but a good Republican having been its presidential candidate in between Nixon's failed 1960 campaign and his successful one in 1968, to tell the guy he had to go.

Finally he went, telling us on the way out the door that his mother was a saint (oh?) but, more significantly, that when it came to resigning

I would have preferred to carry through to the finish whatever the personal agony it would have involved, and my family unanimously urged me to do so.

(I remember thinking that his family's unanimity on the subject was not as compelling a point as he might have thought. Given more recent statements by his son in law, who I expect voted against George W. Bush twice, I wonder whether it was even true.)

So his successor's claim about how well the Constitution worked, one shared by most Americans, did not ring quite as true to me. The crimes Nixon committed were well recognized by most Americans well before the damning tape recording was disclosed, but without that tape, he likely would have survived or, at minimum, removed only after a bruising political battle where many of those who voted for him would feel cheated.

The reason all of this resonates today is the so-called "Pelosi controversy." The people who appear to be outraged have no reason for it. Whether she was told that waterboarding was used, or might be used but had not yet is not an affront to them, nor is her defense that she was lied to hugely significant. (The Bush administration distrusted the CIA so much that they set up a parallel intelligence unit under Douglas Feith at the Defense Department and, except for their lapdog Tenet, were largely shut out from Iraq issues. They leaked furiously to try to get Sen Kerry elected in 2004. To hear Republicans defending the honor of the CIA is almost funny.)

The point is that Speaker Pelosi was not Speaker Pelosi then, and simply the ranking member of a grossly minority faction on the House Intelligence committee. She had as much chance of stopping the White House from waterboarding as Richard Clarke did. None.

Unlike Richard Clarke, though, she did not complain about that, and she agreed to be one of four, or two members of Congress whose attendance at meetings where she could do nothing would constitute congressional notification. And all of these things she did, or didn't do, which were wrong, were motivated by political calculations, not right and wrong. The Bush White House was right in their calculation as to when to "roll out" things that could otherwise cause controversy. They knew that the closer to an election we got, the less likely Democrats, scrambling to keep in office, would speak up in opposition.

And I remind you: the calculation was correct, if immoral. Speaking up against the war, or any of the tactics being employed who have received accolades from a few tiny outposts, such as what is now Daily Kos or the TPM, but otherwise would doom the objectors to defeat. That was the mood of the country then, quite unlike what it is today.

Our Constitution did not work, and the Democrats were not vindicated. George W. Bush, and his cronies, the same Rumsfeld and Cheney who took over the White House while we celebrated the phony President who pretended to be in charge, while buttering his own toast and handing out W.I.N. buttons to "whip inflation now" were exposed to be incompetent, largely becuase they allowed a major American city to float away on national television. Somehow that woke up a sleeping and fearful public, and once the President became a laughing stock, their goose was cooked.

We are blessed by the new President we have, but the cost to get him presents little cause for celebration. The United States Senate showed this week that they remain a craven, out of touch body too scared to do anything of significance. The Majority Leader, as far from being a "leader" in any recognized use of the word outside of the Senate, stooped to absurdities to explain why they could not fund the closing of Guantanamo, a decision mainly based on a fear that Pat Buchanan might criticize them if they did allowed the President to put what amount to prisoners of war in United States prisons.

The demise of Congress which Time wrote about so many years ago is by now a fait accompli. It is why first Nixon, then G.W. Bush could assume royal authority and have both the press and most of the public accept it without whimper. ("The President takes us to war..." and so on.) Even today, President Obama acts as if only by his grace can other branches of government be involved in the P.O.W. issue.

I have no answer for this. The time to do something about it was when I was reading that article so many years ago, but the need to do something about Nixon himself intervened. The best idea I can come up with is for President Obama to remain in office for as long as he is physically able, but, I am not sure that was the framers had in mind either.