Foundations of all totalitarianism...

"The President wants me to argue that he is as powerful a monarch as Louis XIV, only four years at a time, and is not subject to the processes of any court in the land except the court of impeachment."
Sound like something Gonzales would write; something Rove would have arranged; something Bush lives. But this claim was not made by the current Republican administration; no it was made by a much more infamous, though in retrospect less deserving of that derision than the current incumbent, Richard Milhous Nixon. This line was lifted from the opening arguments of Nixon’s legal council, James D. St. Clair, at the Supreme Court trying to defend Nixon’s attempt to extend executive privilege. At the time the Supreme Court held to the foundational premise that no one was above the law; that although it was important to defend the nations, defending it from internal threats, threats that grind away at the very foundation of open and free democracy, were more important. And yet those of the Bush administration would put forward the argument:

“…because the Constitution makes the President the 'Commander-in-Chief,’ no law can restrict the actions he may take in pursuit of war. On this reasoning, the President would be entitled by the Constitution to resort to genocide if he wished." John Yoo (as summarised by David Cole)

It might be argued that if the nations leader had the support of, by that I mean people believe he is doing an excellent job (I think for this point, a good job would not be good enough), the vast majority of the nation. And when I use the term “vast’ I do not mean it in a Bush-tax-cut way, meaning less than 1%, but by the acceptable definition of much greater than a majority, lets just say I mean greater than 75%. If they had the support of the vast majority of the nation, they could then claim to have the authority to act in an unrestrictive way. But the current administration does not have that kind of support, and it is acting in the antithesis of a larger and larger segment of that nation’s population. The Bush administration is running the government as though it was the absolute ruler as a totalitarian state, and henchmen like Fox news it is effectively doing this. Winston Churchill was talking about Hitler and Stalin, but one can not help but think that somehow he would be saying the same thing today about the leader of the most powerful and dangerous nation on the planet.
“You might however consider whether you should not unfold as a background the great privilege of habeas corpus and trial by jury, which are the supreme protection invented by the English people for ordinary individuals against the state. The power of the Executive to cast a man in prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government, whether Nazi or Communist.“ (21 November 1943)