It turns out in the days following September 11 that Bush tried to get
extraordinary powers granted to him through Congress but those attempts failed.
This new information comes from an article appearing in today’s Washington Post:

The Bush administration requested, and Congress rejected, war-making
authority “in the United States” in negotiations over the joint resolution
passed days after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, according to an
opinion article by former Senate majority leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.)
in today’s Washington Post.

[..]

As drafted, and as finally passed, the resolution authorized the
president “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations,
organizations or persons” who “planned, authorized, committed or aided” the
Sept. 11 attacks.

“Literally minutes before the Senate cast its vote, the administration
sought to add the words ‘in the United States and’ after ‘appropriate force’
in the agreed-upon text,” Daschle wrote. “This last-minute change would have
given the president broad authority to exercise expansive powers not just
overseas — where we all understood he wanted authority to act — but right
here in the United States, potentially against American citizens. I could
see no justification for Congress to accede to this extraordinary request
for additional authority. I refused.”

Daschle wrote that Congress also rejected draft language from the White
House that would have authorized the use of force to “deter and pre-empt any
future acts of terrorism or aggression against the United States,” not only
against those responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks.

View complete article

here

This hurts the administration’s argument that they were operating under new
powers granted by Congress in the day’s following the September 11th attacks.
The resolution passed was the “Authorization for use of Military Forces” and it
passed Congress on September 18, 2001. In that resolution, it makes no mention
of intelligence or references to surveillance. In a letter from the justice
department yesterday to Congressional leaders they argued it did give the
President the power to wiretap without warrant.

This actually comes as no surprise in an administration that is topped with
Cheney and Rumsfeld, two key players from the Ford administration who tried to
get the Freedom of Information Act vetoed. These two have always viewed the
Presidency as a dictatorship and would love nothing more but to ignore the
balance of powers in our nation to make it as such, as long as the President is
a Republican.