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no bull, and the aftermath.

Hello and welcome to the LawFair podcast. I'm Benjamin Wittes. Our subject today is Jack's

much anticipated new book, Power and Constraint, the Accountable Presidency after 9-11, which

is now available in stores. Jack needs no introduction to listeners of this podcast. The book, which

I highly recommend, is sure to spark controversy and provoke interesting reactions. Jack and

I spoke about it by phone last week.

So Jack, what's the book about and how is it different from the terror presidency? This

book takes a much broader arc than the terror presidency. That book was a reflection on my years

and two years in service in the Bush administration. This book looks at the entire decade after 9-11

and the legal regime that's built up around it. Its basic claim is fights against the conventional

wisdom that Barack Obama's continuation of George W. Bush's counterterrorism policies

indicate that a failure of constitutionalism in some sense. And the book argues that the opposite

is true. That Texan balances have worked remarkably well in the last decade, both the traditional

forms from Congress, the courts, and the press, and newer forms of watching the presidency

by NGOs and entities inside the executive branch. And it maintains that the reason and the main

reason, there are many reasons offered in the book, but the main reason why Obama embraced Bush's

counterterrorism policies to everyone's surprise in 2009. And since then, is that these institutions

that I described in the book had actually generated a consensus had pushed back against and changed

Bush's counterterrorism policies. And as they were changed, they were legitimated. And that Obama

...