Equal Time

A recent article in the George Washington Law Review by Robert Chesney (at Wake Forest) finds that the Bush Administration is not necessarily using executive privilege more than previous administrations.

As The Monkey Cage reports, Chesney finds, "that since the seminal Supreme Court decision (U.S. v. Reynolds in 1953), there has been a sharp rise in invocations of the privilege, but most of that upward trend occurred during the 1980s, not since 2001. From 2001 through 2006, the Bush administration invoked the privilege a total of 20 times — an average of about 3.3 times per year. By comparison, between 1991 and 2000, Bush’s immediate predecessors, the senior Bush and the putatively first Clinton, tallied an average of 2.6 such assertions per year, up from Reagan and Bush’s average of 2.3 per year between 1981 and 1990. Thus, an upward trend in recent years, but in Chesney’s judgment (and, for that matter, according to by conventional statistical criteria) not a significant one."