As president, Giuliani would grab even more executive power than Bush & Cheney (Washington Monthly)

[kpete]

Rudy Awakening
As president, Giuliani would grab even more executive power than Bush and Cheney. His mayoralty tells the story.
By Rachel Morris

His methods, like those of the current White House, included appointments of yes-men, aggressive tests of legal limits, strategic lawbreaking, resistance to oversight, and obsessive secrecy. As was also the case with the White House, the events of 9/11 solidified the mindset underlying his worst tendencies. Embedded in his operating style is a belief that rules don't apply to him, and a ruthless gift for exploiting the intrinsic weaknesses in the system of checks and balances.

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Criscitello had run into what was becoming a signature feature of Giuliani's governing style. Chafing against the limits of his authority, Giuliani was taking an increasingly instrumentalist view of the law: it was only as good as how well it was enforced, and should be overstepped when doing so served his ends......When Giuliani wanted to do something and was advised by his staff that it was illegal, it was "hard for him," one of his former commissioners explained to me. "As a lawyer, it offends him. He thinks, 'Isn't there a way around this?'" Giuliani often preferred to barrel ahead and force his opponents to go to court to restrain him.

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By Giuliani's own admission, he would, as president, perpetuate many of Bush's boldest assertions of presidential authority. In 2006, Giuliani told the Wall Street Journal that he would probably keep the detention center at Guantanamo Bay open, saying that its conditions had been "grossly exaggerated." This year, at a New Hampshire town hall meeting, he refused to say whether the Bush administration had gone too far in denying the protection of the Geneva Conventions to terrorist suspects. Giuliani has also indicated that presidents have the power to indefinitely detain American citizens without trial. At a debate, he declared himself opposed to torture but refused to say whether he would outlaw waterboarding, instead offering that interrogators should perform "any method they can think of."

What is most disturbing is the likelihood that a Giuliani administration would venture beyond the expansive claims of executive authority staked out by the Bush White House. For instance, though Bush has demanded that Congress fund the war in Iraq, he has never openly questioned Congress's power of the purse. Giuliani, however, told a reporter that the president has the right to provide money for the troops to stay in Iraq even if Congress withdraws funding. Similarly, Bush has implied that critics of his Iraq policy are unpatriotic, but he has not declared that the government can silence their voices. This September, echoing the sentiments that he repeatedly attempted to enforce as mayor, Giuliani said that the "General Betray Us" ad paid for by the left-wing group MoveOn "passed a line that we should not allow American political organizations to pass."


http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2007/0711.morris.html

[riqster]

1. Rudy has nothing but his fake 9/11 image going for him

If he gets the nod, look for all this mud to hit him hard and heavy.

[tbyg52]

2. Here are some more scary bits - emphasis mine

Just what we need - more secrecy, cronyism, vindictiveness, and ignoring the law....

This is just the first four paragraphs that I marked when I read the article. Go read the whole thing. It's appalling, and one can only assume he would operate the same way in any office.

Not long after his second term began, Giuliani sought to make more lasting changes. This time, he went straight for the city charter. Over the past forty years, only two commissions had been held to revise New York's governing document. During his time in office, Giuliani convened three. What's more, although the previous panels had been blue-chip affairs, Giuliani's commissions weren't very prestigious. The first, launched in 1998, was chaired by Giuliani's longtime friend Peter Powers. It was dominated by members who were undoubtedly experienced in government, but who happened to have acquired that experience by working for Rudy Giuliani. It was advised by attorneys from Giuliani's Law Department and usually met in secret. One of the first things it considered was a proposal dear to the mayor: abolishing the Independent Budget Office and the Office of the Public Advocate.

In 1996, Doug Criscitello, a former federal budget analyst, started work as the first director of the Independent Budget Office. Criscitello expected to put his auditors to work immediately, but then he received a surprising communication from the mayor's office. It was a memorandum informing him that all the IBO's requests for data had to be referred to City Hall—despite plain language in the city charter stating that the IBO could get information directly from municipal agencies. Puzzled, Criscitello contacted Giuliani's lawyers, who reaffirmed the message. "They weren't nasty about it. They were very matter-of-fact," said Criscitello. " 'Here's how we've decided to interpret the charter, and if you disagree there's a legal process you can go through and we can get a judge to rule on this.'" Eventually, the IBO sued the mayor's office for the data, and in 1998 a state judge ruled that City Hall had violated the city charter and ordered it to start cooperating. Meanwhile, Giuliani had bought two years of time.

Giuliani also unashamedly flouted the First Amendment to crush dissent both inside and outside his government. He lost thirty-five First Amendment cases in court. His administration was found to have shut down or delayed legal protests, illegally prevented its own employees from making protected public statements, and illegally prevented New Yorkers from gathering on the steps of City Hall. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals took the unusual step of reprimanding the administration, noting, "e would be ostriches if we failed to take judicial notice of the heavy stream of First Amendment litigation generated by New York City in recent years."

In all of these cases, Giuliani was ultimately checked by the courts, even if his strategy had gained him valuable time. Sometimes, though, he got away with skirting the law because no one was able or inclined to restrain him. In 2000, when an off-duty security guard named Patrick Dorismond was shot and killed by undercover police officers, Giuliani released details from Dorismond's sealed juvenile record at a press conference—in plain defiance of state law. "The media would not want a picture presented of an altar boy," he said, "when in fact, maybe it isn't an altar boy, it's some other situation that may justify, more closely, what the police officer did." (Dorismond had, in fact, once been an altar boy.) In its defense, City Hall claimed—erroneously—that victims had no right to privacy after they were dead. Then it emerged that the administration had revealed details from sealed files to the media before, including the records of at least two police victims who were still alive. Although Mark Green wanted to sue the mayor's office for the leaks, the public advocate lacked the power to do so. The state attorney general didn't choose to pursue the case. Giuliani and his officials were never penalized.