Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency
and the Subversion of American Democracy. A book by Charlie Savage

In 1789, the Founding Fathers came up with a system of checks and
balances to keep kingly powers out of the hands of American
presidents. But in the 1970s and '80s, a faction of Republican
loyalists, outraged by the fall of the imperial presidency after
Watergate and the Vietnam War, abandoned conservatives' traditional
suspicion of concentrated government power. These men hatched a plot
that would allow the White House to return to, or even surpass, the
virtually unchecked powers that Richard Nixon had briefly tried to
wield. Congress would be defanged, and the commander in chief would
be able to assert a unilateral dominance both at home and abroad.

Today, this plot is coming to fruition. As Takeover reveals, the
Bush-Cheney administration has succeeded in seizing vast powers for
the presidency by throwing off many of the restraints placed upon it
by Congress, the courts, and the Constitution.

Charlie Savage's timely book unveils the secret machinations behind
the headlines, explaining the links between warrantless wiretapping
and President Bush's Supreme Court nominees, between the
unprecedented politicization of the Justice Department and the
torture debate, between the White House's use of "signing
statements" to assert a right to defy new laws and its efforts to
impose greater control over career military JAG lawyers, and between
the secrecy surrounding Vice President Cheney's energy task force
and the holding of U.S. citizens without trial as "enemy
combatants."

It tells, for the first time, the full story of a hidden agenda
three decades in the making, laying out how a group of true
believers set out to establish monarchical executive powers that, in
the words of one conservative critic, "will lie around like a loaded
weapon" ready to be picked up by any future president - liberal and
conservative alike.

Brilliantly reported and deftly told, Takeover is a searing
investigation into how the constitutional balance of our democracy
is in danger of being permanently altered. For anyone who cares
about America's past, present, and future, it is essential reading.