Bush's legacy and staff, dissected

The vehicle for this restoration is a revisionist theory of constitutional law called "Unitary Executive Theory." As Savage tells us, it was first promulgated under Reagan administration Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese and since has been elaborated by people like Cheney's aide David Addington, John Yoo, the UC Berkeley legal scholar who wrote the administration's infamous torture memos, and future Supreme Court justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito. Under this theory, the framers intended a presidency that presides over the executive branch as a single brain does over a body. Congress has no right in this schema to check the president's inherent powers, particularly when it comes to national security. Thus, Yoo and others of a similar mind -- including Cheney -- believe that the president has inherent powers to wage war without congressional consent, to authorize warrantless searches and spying, to abrogate international treaties at will and to decide which, if any congressional or judicial restraints on his powers he will accept.

The Supreme Court under Republican Chief Justice William Rehnquist overwhelmingly rejected the Reagan administration's attempt to assert "Unitary Executive Theory" and no serious legal or historical student of the founding era accepts it.

As Savage argues, though, the fact remains that because Bush has been allowed to enact Unitary Theory through precedent, the next president, whether conservative Republican or liberal Democrat, will inherit precisely the kind of imperial executive Cheney set out to restore.

At least somebody is going to leave this White House a success.

timothy.rutten@latimes.com