by Charles Hugh Smith, Of Two Minds:

Regardless of who holds the office, America’s Imperial Project and its Imperial Presidency are due for a grand reckoning.

While elections and party politics generate the emotions and headlines, the truly consequential change in American governance has been the ascendancy of the Imperial Presidency over the past 75 years, since the end of World War II.

As commander-in-chief of the armed forces, the Constitution grants the President extraordinary but temporary powers in wartime. With the power to declare war granted solely to Congress, this dangerous (in the Founders’ view) expansion of Executive power was tolerated because it was temporary and necessary in the fast-moving emergency of war.

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Congress has declared war a total of five times, while U.S. armed forces have been deployed in conflicts 300 times. So in 295 conflicts out of 300, the president had sole discretion. Various stamps of Congressional approval of these wartime powers have been given over the decades, but these are more for show than actual limits on presidential powers.

The extraordinary powers granted to President Roosevelt in World War II did not expire at the end of the war. Rather, the powers of the presidency expanded along with the National Security agencies which rose to unprecedented power in the Cold War era of 1945 – 1991. The entire alphabet soup of the National Security State–CIA, NSA, DIA, etc.–serve the president, not Congress, which has been relegated the role of toothless oversight.

Historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.’s 1973 book, The Imperial Presidency , introduced the term Imperial Presidency into the American lexicon.

While historians have documented the rise of Executive power at the expense of the legislative branch and pundits have wrung their hands over this concentration of vast, often secret power in the presidency, nobody within the status quo has addressed the core reason behind the rise of the Imperial Presidency: America’s Empire requires a CEO/Emperor as a simple operational reality.

You can’t run a global military / commercial / diplomatic empire with a slow-moving legislative body; you need a dynamic CEO (chief executive officer) with essentially unlimited powers to do whatever it takes to run the empire.

Empires need an emperor, and this is the history of post-WW2 America. As the victor, the U.S. emerged with a global reach and power that can only be described as imperial. While the USSR soon gained military parity with nuclear weapons and vast tank armies aimed at Western Europe, the commercial empire was solely American.

While some cheered America’s global empire and others shouldered it as a necessary Cold war burden, the status quo relished the immense expansion of centralized bureaucratic and executive powers.

An Imperial President requires the Imperial machinery of global hegemony, and so the National Security State replaced the elected government as the real power. For a peek behind the curtain of the Imperial Presidency’s powers, please read The Enemies Briefcase: Secret powers and the presidency. (via Cheryl A.)

The last time the U.S. Congress pushed back against the Imperial Presidency and Security Agencies was 45 years ago, in 1975. In response to the domestic over-reach of the ImperialPresidency (Watergate) and the security agencies (COINTELPRO, etc.), the Church Committee undertook the first comprehensive review of the presidency’s expansive secret powers and the secret powers wielded by the National Security State.

The domestic abuses of power by the FBI and CIA included the blatantly illegal COINTELPRO programs aimed at destroying the anti-war / civil rights movements in the 1960s and early 1970s.

We know from the Church Committee reports that the FBI and CIA broke numerous federal laws and violated every constitutional limit on their powers as a matter of daily policy. The abuses of power were not the work of rogue agents or even rogue agencies; the abuses were SOP (standard operating procedures) for the Imperial machinery of the presidency and the security agencies that served the essentially unlimited power of the Imperial presidency.

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