Benjamin Wittes Quotes
If you believe, as I do, that the scope and range of presidential authority is great, that puts a lot of weight on the civic virtue and decency of the individual who holds the office.
Wittes, Benjamin. "A Note to Our Readers on the Trump Presidency." Lawfare, The Lawfare Institute, 2017.
Defending himself against the charge that he had fathered an illegitimate child:
This quotation was an attack on President George W. Bush who had argued to a nation hostile about the Iraq War that the decision on whether to continue the war should be determined in large part by the report that was to be given by the commander of our forces In Iraq, General David Petraeus. He reported that he thought we should give the situation some more time and effort, and that was the policy decision. Clark and others thought this was not fair to Petraeus whose job it was not to make the policy but to implement it. It was perhaps the only time in history where a President abdicated a major war policy decision to a field officer. The President even argued to Congress that they should all wait for the General to return to Washington. He argued that he made the decision; he just wanted to hear the General’s recommendation. Most believed that he could have obtained that without the General returning to Washington to talk to Congress and the American people.
There have been many power struggles between the Legislative and Executive branches, but one of the more humorous began on August 27, 1906. President Theodore Roosevelt directed the Public Printer to observe a new orthographic convention designed to simplify the spelling of English. A furor broke out as Congress fought against such a radical departure The President was defeated and so was "simplified spelling."
Benjamin Wittes is an American legal journalist and Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, where he is the Research Director in Public Law, and Co-Director of the Harvard Law School–Brookings Project on Law and Security. He works principally on issues related to American law and national security. Along with Robert M. Chesney and Jack Goldsmith, Wittes cofounded the Lawfare Blog. Wittes is also a member of the Hoover Institution's Task Force on National Security and Law. Wittes is a frequent speaker on topics of detention, interrogation, and national security, before academic, government, policy, and military audiences. He also co-hosts the Rational Security podcast.
