President Obama Briefly Worried That His Unaccountable, Murderous Power Might Fall Into Republican Hands

The first 61 words of this chilling and banal New York Times article are a perfect distillation of how grotesque power appears in the eye of Americans who wield it:

Facing the possibility that President Obama might not win a second term, his administration accelerated work in the weeks before the election to develop explicit rules for the targeted killing of terrorists by unmanned drones, so that a new president would inherit clear standards and procedures, according to two administration officials.

The matter may have lost some urgency after Nov. 6.

A reminder to most Democrats who spent 2002-08 telling us that abuse of executive power was at or near the top of the nation's most urgent moral concerns: You just didn't mean it.

More from the article:

"There was concern that the levers might no longer be in our hands," said one official, speaking on condition of anonymity. With a continuing debate about the proper limits of drone strikes, Mr. Obama did not want to leave an "amorphous" program to his successor, the official said. The effort, which would have been rushed to completion by January had Mr. Romney won, will now be finished at a more leisurely pace, the official said. […]

"One of the things we've got to do is put a legal architecture in place, and we need Congressional help in order to do that, to make sure that not only am I reined in but any president's reined in terms of some of the decisions that we're making," Mr. Obama told Jon Stewart in an appearance on "The Daily Show" on Oct. 18.

In an interview with Mark Bowden for a new book on the killing of Osama bin Laden, "The Finish," Mr. Obama said that "creating a legal structure, processes, with oversight checks on how we use unmanned weapons, is going to be a challenge for me and my successors for some time to come."

The point of constitutional governance is that the legal structure for and oversight of executive power is not a task for the executive itself. The fact that a president (and former constitutional law professor) would think otherwise vividly illustrates how far from that bedrock concept we have strayed.