From my Admin law reading this evening: 

“The importance of a fixed constitutional framework and stable institutional arrangements is necessarily lost once the framework that was designed to place a limit upon politics becomes the central subject ofthe politics it was designed to limit.” - Richard Epstein

This is useful to keep in mind as we think about what we’ve witnessed in the last 15 years in Bangladesh.

While we are on the subject of constitutional frameworks and institutional arrangements, it looks like The Terror Presidency by Jack Goldsmith (who headed the Office of Legal Counsel in 2003-4) will be a fascinating read, if I can get to it some time… Excerpts daily at Slate.com.  My favorite passage so far:

The Bush administration’s go-it-alone approach to many terrorism-related legal policy issues is the antithesis of Roosevelt’s approach in 1940–41. It is a truism among political scientists and historians who study the American presidency that a president’s authority is not measured primarily by his hard power found in the Constitution, statutes, and precedents, but rather by his softer powers to convince the other institutions of our society to come around to his point of view. “The power to manage the vast, whirring machinery of government derives from individual skills as persuader, bargainer, and leader,” Schlesinger said, echoing the famous thesis of presidential scholar Richard Neustadt. The Bush administration has operated on an entirely different concept of power that relies on minimal deliberation, unilateral action, and legalistic defense. This approach largely eschews politics: the need to explain, to justify, to convince, to get people on board, to compromise.

Whereas Roosevelt was famous for consulting widely (though not always transparently) within and without his administration before making momentous wartime decisions, the Bush administration is famously secretive and close-looped in its deliberations.