Senator Hillary Clinton said Tuesday that the Bush-Cheney administration had engaged in a “power grab” and that she would consider relinquishing some of that executive power if she followed it into the White House.
“There were a lot of actions which they took that were clearly beyond any power the Congress would have granted, or that in my view that was inherent in the Constitution,” Mrs. Clinton said, in an interview posted on the Web site of The Guardian newspaper of Britain.
Asked whether a president could “actually give up some of this power in the name of constitutional principle,” Mrs. Clinton answered, “Absolutely.”
She did not provide specifics about which claims to power she would relinquish, adding, “That has to be part of the review that I undertake when I get to the White House.”
Democrats and some Republicans have criticized the administration, saying it has overstepped constitutional bounds by eavesdropping on certain telephone conversations without warrants, suspending due process for people classified as enemy combatants and generally resisting Congressional scrutiny.
Mrs. Clinton hinted at some of that in the interview, saying she was concerned with the answers provided in Congressional testimony by Michael B. Mukasey, President Bush’s nominee for attorney general.
In his confirmation hearings last week, Mr. Mukasey suggested that eavesdropping without warrants and using “enhanced” interrogation techniques for terrorism suspects might be constitutional, even if they exceeded what the law technically allowed. Mrs. Clinton called Mr. Mukasey’s answers an “expansive definition of executive power.”
a bipartisan rule, presidents jealously protect their prerogative of executive power, though Sidney M. Milkis, a professor of political science at the University of Virginia, said there was some precedent of candidates’ promising to relinquish it in reaction to administrations perceived to have overreached. This year, he said, is such a year.
Officials of the presidential campaign of Senator Barack Obama of Illinois said Mr. Obama, too, had indicated he would scale back executive power. John Edwards and other Democratic candidates have made similar statements.
But Professor Milkis said of past candidates, “That rhetoric has not really been fulfilled when these people got into power.”
Mrs. Clinton’s promise to undo Mr. Bush’s policies became public on a day when Mr. Obama intensified his argument that she had enabled the administration to potentially act militarily against Iran.
The two rivals have been arguing about Mrs. Clinton’s vote for an amendment calling on the administration to designate the Revolutionary Guard Corps of Iran a foreign terrorist organization. Mr. Obama was not present for the vote.
In a mailing to Iowa voters, Mr. Obama said that “while other Democrats” supported the amendment, “Barack Obama opposed another Bush foreign policy fiasco.”
On Tuesday, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign fired back, saying Mr. Obama was a co-sponsor of a bill in March with Senator Gordon H. Smith, Republican of Oregon, calling for the Revolutionary Guard to be designated a “terrorist” organization.
A spokesman for Mr. Obama, Bill Burton, said Mr. Obama did not oppose the “terrorist designation” in the amendment that Mrs. Clinton supported but rather language in the nonbinding provision that discussed forces in Iraq in terms of affecting Iran.
Mrs. Clinton’s campaign responded by citing parallel comments Mr. Obama made last year in a speech on the Iranian threat.