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When it comes to issues like warrantless surveillance, continuity is the rule and not the exception and in fact in some very important areas this administration has gone even farther than the Bush Administration did. That the government can mark an American for death without any judicial oversight is something the framers of the Constitution would have found totally foreign to the project they were engaged in.

I think there are many Democrats out there who are quiet because they trust President Obama, there’s no doubt that the power we’re giving President Obama will be available to a future president. We didn’t worry so much about that because the Bush Administration was seen as an outlier and an aberration, and the Bush precedent wouldn’t have been seen as weighty.

It’s not at all difficult to imagine future presidents citing President Obama in their defense of carrying out more targeted killings of American citizens. Now we’re making many of these emergency powers permanent and bipartisan. We’re enshrining these things into our permanent law.