In a subscriber-only article, the Economist argues that aside from Bush's foreign policy and pursuit of big-government spending, he worringly

...has increased the power of the presidency at the expense of other branches of government...

In January 2003, the White House sent Congress a proposal for reform of the health-care system. The price tag, it said, was $400 billion. The real cost was $534 billion. Medicare's chief actuary was told not to answer congressional questions on pain of dismissal. After the House and Senate passed different versions of the proposal, the Republicans began work to reconcile the two. They refused to let five of the Democrats nominated to the process take part in deliberations—and rewrote the bill.

Even then, they fell short of a majority when voting began, at 3am. Defying precedent, the House leadership held the vote open for three hours while arms were twisted. The bill finally passed just before 6am. Norm Ornstein, of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, called it the ugliest breach of congressional standards in modern history...

Even if you think the ends are good, the means have inflicted institutional harm on Congress. The committee system for amending bills has all but collapsed. Bills are now written by the leaders and their staffs, in concert with the White House. Debate is often cut off: many controversial measures are voted on under a “closed rule”, which bars amendments. The conference stage, when different versions of a bill are reconciled, has been turned from an occasion for compromise into yet another opportunity for partisan gain. Sometimes the conference committee does not meet at all. Sometimes Republicans have ignored the rule that says the committee can only iron out differences, and have fundamentally altered bills at the last minute. The budget process is in tatters.

As for Congress's other main job—oversight of the administration—that has declined too, with a few exceptions (the Senate Armed Services Committee held useful hearings on the Abu Ghraib scandal). Serious investigation has been left to special commissions, such as the one that looked into the September 11th attacks. The responsibility for this lies largely with congressional Republicans: they are reluctant to investigate one of their own...

The power of the president is limited not only by the might of Congress but by a host of smaller laws and administrative rules: freedom-of-information requests, the power to classify documents, and civil-service procedures. Partly in response to domestic security worries, the discretionary power of the executive has increased substantially in these areas.

The best-known examples come from the Patriot Act, which boosted law-enforcement powers and surveillance. That act, at least, was passed by Congress and is subject to congressional review. More commonly, the administration has increased its powers by asserting them. Soon after September 11th, Mr Ashcroft issued new guidelines on freedom-of-information requests. The attorney-general reversed the Clinton-era policy of rejecting such requests only if to allow them would cause "substantial harm". Public-interest groups complain that requests are now often denied, even over matters that seem to have nothing to do with security, such as pollution or car safety.

According to figures from the National Archives, around 44m documents were classified in the first two years of the current administration—as many as in the whole of Mr Clinton's second term. More officials—including, for some reason, the secretary of agriculture—have been given the power to classify materials...

A subset of this reaction against scrutiny is the use of what might be called government by small print: slipping additions into law at the last minute or tinkering with the wording of rules that implement laws. As a recent series in the Washington Post argued, such changes often appear minor but can have a big impact. By changing the word “waste” to “fill” in a rule governing coal-mining, for instance, the administration allowed an increase in strip-mining in West Virginia. By adding two sentences about scientific evidence to an unrelated budget bill, it gave itself increased authority to rule in regulatory disputes.

Perhaps the most disturbing way in which the administration has increased its power has been through its public-relations machine. Thomas Jefferson said long ago that a well-informed electorate is the most important constraint on government. By issuing partial and sometimes misleading information, the Bush administration has hampered such scrutiny.

Consider for instance the arguments for tax cuts. Here, Mr Bush made claims about the cost of the cuts and their distributional impact that he should have known were misleading. In 2000, he claimed the first round of cuts would cost $1.6 trillion over ten years, a quarter of the budget surplus at that point. On his own figures, the share was a third, not a quarter, and he arrived at the figure only through outrageous accounting gimmicks that he is now campaigning to forbid.

Meanwhile, Amity Shlaes argues that Bush's economic plans move the U.S. from an entitlement society to a stakeholder society. OK, but what about Bush's deficit? On the other hand, who knows what Kerry's going to do.