The 28 Percent President

David Rogers and Patrick O'Connor write for Politico: "From Medicare to mortgages, President Bush's lame-duck status is more and more evident in Congress, as restless Republicans defect and power shifts to activist Cabinet members, such as Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, willing to engage with Democrats."

The Dark Side

New Yorker writer Jane Mayer's new book, "The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals," was the subject of much of my column yesterday and Monday.

Yesterday afternoon, Mayer spoke with Eric Umansky of ProPublica about Bush's curiously passive role during so many key moments of his presidency:

"The big argument being made by the vice president, his lawyer, David Addington, and the Justice Department was that the commander-and-chief needed almost unfettered powers to win the war on terror. And yet when you really examine the record, it's frequently not the president who's making many of these calls; it's the vice president," she said.

"The president, it's funny, I asked a lot of questions about him when I was doing interviews, and he keeps disappearing from the frame of the picture. He is described as distracted by one of the people who briefed him. Colin Powell tells a friend who I interviewed he sees the president not as being stupid but as being too easily manipulated by Cheney, who knew how to push him around."

Daniel Strauss blogs for the American Prospect about a talk Mayer gave yesterday morning: "Mayer was asked if anyone within the Bush White House are war criminals:

"'As a political reporter, I've covered the White House since the Reagan era, off and on, so I really see this much more as a political question than a legal question. . . . You have to ask yourself "do you see the appetite in this country for putting people on trial who could say that they were trying to protect America in a difficult time?" I think it's a real stretch to think that the public is the public is going to demand that these people go on trial.'

"But," Strauss writes, "perhaps that would change if some of the still 'unsolved mysteries' Mayer mentioned were uncovered:

"'There are a number of legal memos nobody's seen, we've never seen the list of interrogation techniques that have been approved by this country. There are cases where people have disappeared, there are some where people seem to have been killed -- we really don't know everything yet and I would like to see at some point the books open and maybe hearings of some sort so that we can at least learn what the country's been doing and think about which part is worth it and which part is not.'"

Succession Watch

Bruce Ackerman writes in Slate about Mayer's resurrection of a claim in an earlier book by James Mann that President Reagan amended the presidential succession process "for speed and clarity . . . without informing Congress that it had been sidestepped."

Writes Ackerman: "We don't know how. But if the order bypasses the speaker and the Senate president pro tempore in favor of an official in the executive branch, we have a recipe for a constitutional crisis. . . .

"In the scenario I'm envisioning, [House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi would assert her claim as acting president under existing statutes while Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, or some other executive official, would simultaneously assert her competing authority under the executive order. . . .