Extreme Injury by Elaine Scarry via The Boston Review

In a 2008 television interview, former Vice President Dick Cheney addressed complaints about the overreaching of the executive branch. In order to defend the Bush administration, he might have argued that reports of presidential overreaching were exaggerated. Instead he argued the opposite: the public, he suggested, has an insufficient appreciation of how truly vast that presidential power is. Accompanied around the clock by a military aid carrying the nuclear football,
[The president] could launch the kind of devastating attack the world has never seen. He doesn’t have to check with anybody. He doesn’t have to call the Congress; he doesn’t have to check with the courts. He has that authority because of the nature of the world we live in. It’s unfortunate, but I think we’re perfectly appropriate to take the steps we have.

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