Digby gives us this David Cole review of John Yoo's opus on the unlimited power of the Presidency in times of war.  If you want a feel for the Bush administration's current ideological view of presidential power this review will give you the basics and it ain't pretty.  I especially like the part where Yoo consulted 18th century dictionaries, parsing word definitions to show that the Constitution really didn't intend for the Congress to have any role in declaring or conducting a war. 

Is it just me or was the constitutional originalist movement ever serious or after being in power a few years has it just run its course and become a parody of what it was supposedly against?  I really can't see how a serious "original intent" constitutional scholar can look at the historical context of the founding of the Republic, yet alone the debates at the constitutional convention, and say flat out that the founding fathers, even after fighting a war against a monarch they considered a despot ,would just turn around and give monarchical powers to the president.