WORK IN PROGESS

Law School’s Charles Tiefer Details Bush Administration’s Legal Moves in Powerful New Book

With the recent release of Veering Right: How the Bush Administration Subverts the Law for Conservative Causes, School of Law Professor Charles Tiefer is hard at work promoting the book and helping facilitate the passionate dialogue stemming from its central thesis.

Tiefer, a former deputy general counsel and solicitor for the U.S. House of Representatives and a member of UB’s law faculty since 1995, began research for the project during the summer of 2001.

“It started with the passage of the trillion-dollar tax cuts,” Tiefer said.

A noted expert on congressional procedures and customs, he had been asked by the Legal Times newspaper in Washington to write an article on the controversial firing of the Senate’s parliamentarian. It was his investigation into the firing, which Tiefer concluded was linked to the tax cuts, which became the springboard for the new book. He used a yearlong sabbatical starting in 2002 to complete the first manuscript; rewriting and updating continued through the early part of this year. The book, just published by the prestigious University of California Press in Berkeley, has received praise nationwide. It has led to multiple appearances on regional and national media, including op-eds in the online magazine Salon and a number of print and radio appearances.

The author of three previous books on public affairs in Washington, Tiefer believes that Veering Right offers readers a legal perspective from which they can thoroughly understand the Bush administration’s decisions and policy making. Using the law and public policy as his bulwark, he argues that the White House has “methodically manipulated the law to promote right-wing causes.”

“I had seen books written about an administration after the president’s term had ended, but I didn’t think that there was much public or scholarly interest after the fact,” he said. “This book is a real-time analysis.”

Tiefer had a variety of experiences during his 15-year tenure with Congress, making him a much sought-after authority on the legalities of legislative process and customs. Among his numerous congressional investigations was the 1987 Iran Contra scandal, for which he served as special deputy counsel for the joint Senate hearings. In 1989, Tiefer authored a 1,048-page examination of congressional procedure, which is still in use as a reference by members of Congress.

Tiefer joined the School of Law faculty after ending his work on Capitol Hill. He teaches contracts as well as a government contracts seminar.

When asked what he would like readers to take away from Veering Right, he replied: “The public should know that a presidential administration can have a coherent legal strategy for serving its base constituency. There should be legal unity between all of an administration’s parts.”

Dovetailing from the book, Tiefer will host a panel discussion concerning White House policies on combating terrorism on October 21 at 6:15 p.m. in the William H. Thumel Business Center. Participants include Tiefer, Lance Cole, consultant to the 9/11 Commission and a professor in the Dickinson Law School; Jeffrey Ian Ross, associate professor of criminology, criminal justice and social policy at UB; David Schanzer, Democratic staff director of the Homeland Security Committee; and another panelist to be named.

The discussion, free and open to the public, will provide a cross-discipline analysis of anti-terrorist policies from foreign and domestic perspectives. There will be a question and answer session immediately following the discussion.

To read more about Veering Right, visit http://www.bushveeringright.net/PrintMedia.html.