Saturday, December 22, 2007 3:16 PM
Blawg Book Highlighter #15: Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy
The end of the year brings not only the onslaught of holiday brag letters and recycled fruitcakes, but also a seemingly endless barrage of “best of” lists.
But don’t fret, the Blawg Book Highlighter isn’t going to jump on that “best of” bandwagon. Because we’re lazy, still have last-minute shopping to do, and others have done the work for us.
The reality is that legal books rarely find their way onto these end-of-year “best of” lists because, well, we’re not sure. Either nobody’s reading them. Or they’re just not that good.
We did manage to dig up one pundit out there who is apparently paying attention to legal books. That’s Dahlia Lithwick, senior editor and Supreme Court correspondent for the online magazine, Slate, which asked all of its regular contributors to cough up a list of their favorite books of the year. Lithwick named three legal books “that most changed the landscape this year”: Jeff Toobin’s The Nine (Blawg Book Highlighter No. 10); Jack Goldsmith’s The Terror Presidency (coming next week); and this week’s highlighted book, Charlie Savage’s Takeover. Each of the aforementioned books, according to Dahlia Lithwick, shines “much-needed light on how the notion of the rule of law has changed so dramatically in America, and why it has happened with so little comment.”
Savage, a journalist who won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for his articles about presidential power in the Boston Globe, expands on that theme in his book which explores how the constitutional balance of powers has been tipped in favor of the executive branch under President George W. Bush’s administration. Savage contends that “the Bush-Cheney administration has succeeded in seizing vast powers for the presidency by throwing off many of the restraints placed upon it by Congress, the courts, and the Constitution.” The book “unveils the secret machinations behind the headlines, explaining the links between warrantless wiretapping and the President Bush's Supreme Court nominees, between the torture debate and the secrecy surrounding Vice President Cheney's energy task force, and between the ‘faith-based initiative’ and the holding of US citizens without trial as ‘enemy combatants.’”
Reviews have been favorable. Michiko Kakutani writes for the New York Times that “Takeover is important reading for anyone interested in how the current administration has amped up presidential power while trying to undermine Congress’s powers of oversight and the independence of the judiciary.” Tim Rutten of the Los Angeles Times weighs in that Takeover “is a gifted reporter’s exposition of how and why the Bush administration has conducted itself and of that conduct’s disturbing legacy.” And Elbert Ventura of the San Francisco Chronicle calls it a “masterful work of journalism” that “deserves to be remembered as one of the key texts of the Bush years."
To learn more about the book, read an excerpt or Savage’s 2007 Pulitzer Prize-winning articles about presidential power in the Boston Globe, or visit his website.
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Randy Richardson is an author, humorist, former journalist, and a lawyer. His fiction debut, Lost in the Ivy, a murder mystery set against the backdrop of Chicago's storied Wrigley Field, won the Writers Marketing Association's “Fresh Voices” Book Award and the Illinois Woman's Press Association's Mate E. Palmer Communications Contest. He writes the Dad Libs column for SanityCentral.com and is a frequent contributor to Chicago Parent magazine. In his day job, he is an attorney for the Social Security Administration’s disability appeals branch. At night and during lunch breaks, he serves as president of the Chicago Writers Association (chicagowrites.org) and works on his second novel while a 4-year-old tugs on his legs. Visit his website at www.lostintheivy.com.
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