The following op-ed, The laws in wartime, written by Harvard Law School Professor Jack Goldsmith, was published in Slate on April 2, 2008.
Don’t count on the next president to undo George W. Bush’s legal policies in the war on terrorism. All three remaining presidential candidates have pledged to close the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, pay greater respect to law, tamp down unilateral presidential powers, and enhance America’s stature abroad. But many controversial Bush administration policies have already been revised to satisfy congressional and judicial critics. And after receiving a few harrowing threat briefings and absorbing the awesome personal responsibility of keeping Americans safe, the new commander in chief won’t rush to eliminate the Bush program as it stands next January. He or she will realize that any legal climb-down that is later perceived as even indirectly responsible for an attack would be a personal and political disaster.
Aggressive counterterrorism policies will thus continue into the next presidency. They will, however, be wrapped in more attractive packaging and adjusted in ways appropriate for an indefinite conflict. Some suggestions for how to achieve these goals:
• Boost trust and credibility. Many people accuse the Bush administration of exaggerating the terror threat for political gain, but the truth is nearer the opposite: The Bush administration frets about homeland attacks more than it lets on. Yet as 9/11 recedes from national memory, the public worries less about the terror threat it cannot see and more about aggressive powers and policies whose purpose it cannot fully appreciate. This growing gap between the government’s view of the terror threat and the public’s is an enormous challenge for any president. “[P]ublic sentiment is everything,” Abraham Lincoln once said. “With public sentiment nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed.”
The next government can narrow this credibility gap by fighting the intelligence community’s notorious tendency to over-classify, and by making public more threat information so the nation can better understand what it faces.
But more information from even a rhetorically gifted president will not be enough. The president’s words are more credible when echoed by officials who do not share all of his political aims. When Franklin Delano Roosevelt began to prepare the nation for war in the spring of 1940, he appointed Henry Stimson and Frank Knox—Republicans who rabidly opposed his New Deal—as secretaries of war and Navy, respectively. These men were invaluable in convincing the Congress and the nation that FDR acted in good faith in taking aggressive steps against the growing but underappreciated German threat in the year before Pearl Harbor. The next president should follow FDR’s lead by filling important national security positions with individuals from the other party.
• Work with Congress. The next president can further enhance the credibility of war-on-terror policies by getting Congress—especially political opponents in Congress—onboard. The president can share more national-security data with Congress than with the public. When Congress supports aggressive policies based on this information, the nation is more likely to accept that the president is acting in good faith. After 16 Democrats in the Senate and 41 Democrats in the House joined Republicans last August to give a weakened president unprecedented surveillance powers, it became much harder for critics to maintain that the terror threat did not warrant such broad powers.
When the president presses Congress to take a stand on war-on-terror issues, he and the nation receive other benefits as well. (This is a central theme of Ben Wittes’ forthcoming Law and the Long War.) Forcing Congress to act spreads responsibility for policies when things go bad, as John Kerry learned when he tried to run away from his 2002 Iraq vote in the 2004 presidential election. Congressional debates educate the country about the nature and stakes of the terror threat. And congressional approval increases judicial support that will be crucial in the long war. The Supreme Court’s main objection to President Bush’s counterterrorism policies has been that he’s acted without or contrary to Congress. But the court almost always goes along with national-security policies supported by both political branches.
There is no guarantee, of course, that the next president can persuade Congress about the terror threat or that Congress will not play politics with a terrorism issue. But the politics of terrorism usually cut in favor of aggressive action, and a president who genuinely engages Congress can almost always get what he or she needs for national security.
Continue reading The laws in wartime.
Jack Goldsmith, a professor at Harvard Law School and author of “The Terror Presidency,” worked in the Bush administration from 2002 to 2004 and is a member of the Hoover Institution Task Force on National Security and Law.