The Constitution According to Bush

Constitutional law professor Jack Balkin has been writing a series of posts on the incredibly broad interpretation of the president's constitutional war powers promulgated by the Bush Administration. The latest here: The Election and the Constitution. Any true republican has to be concerned when:

In the past three years, the Bush Administration has reinterpreted the Presidency, and hence the constitutional system of checks and balances, in the image of an all-powerful Commander-in-Chief. In its most extreme form, it produces the logic of the OLC torture memo, which asserts that Congress may not interfere in any way with the President-as-Commander-in-Chief, and that all laws and international obligations that might interfere with his decisions as Commander-in-Chief must be construed not to apply to him.

Read the whole thing, and the rest of Balkin's blog, but this passage struck me as quite illustrative of what is happening:

The Constitution we are likely to inherit from a second Bush Administration will be a bit like the famous New Yorker cartoon of the New Yorker's vision of the World, with the Commander-in-Chief Clause dominating the page in powerful, large letters, and the rest of the Constitutional text shrinking away into tiny, barely readable prose.

Herewith, my un-artistic version of The Constitution According to Bush [PDF].