In her recent speech at the Conference on World Affairs, Rachel Maddow cited James Madison's warning about the unitary executive, the propensity of an unchecked executive branch to lean toward war, whereas the legislature would be more likely to debate the issue before moving toward conflict. Maddow's supposition, that the Bush administration's seeming incompetence, its torture memos, its rush to war, was by design -- Bush and Cheney's direct effort to shift power to the executive and, thereby, to shift the entire country to a more warlike stance -- does have historical precedence.


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