Clinton: Take My Power, Please

Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton has denounced what she calls a Bush administration "power grab" to concentrate more authority in the White House. She says she'd undertake a review of accumulated powers and would "absolutely" consider giving some of them up as president.

Matthew Yglesias has his doubts that Clinton would voluntary relinquish much in the way of executive power, arguing that "she's not committing herself to doing anything in particular." He notes that Charlie Savage, a legal affairs reporter for the Boston Blobe makes the case in this month's Atlantic that a rollback by any future president is unlikely:

Indeed, presidential power has been mostly growingâ€"in fits and startsâ€"since World War II. An early-20th-century president, such as Calvin Coolidge, had no large standing army to command, nor a CIA to use for covert operations. He would not have dreamed of launching a major overseas war without permission from Congressâ€"as Harry Truman did in Korea. He could not utter the magic words state secrets or executive privilege to nullify lawsuits and evade congressional oversightâ€"both of these precedents were set during Dwight Eisenhower’s administration. By exploiting the sense of permanent crisis that surrounded the early Cold War, presidents of both parties cowed both Congress and the Supreme Court. Today, the war on terrorism has provided a similar rationale.