By David Nather, CQ Staff

Now that she has been in the Senate for nearly seven years, Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York claims she would do exactly what the experts say a newly elected president would never do: give up some of the powers that George W. Bush has claimed for the presidency.

“I think you have to restore the checks and balances and the separation of powers, which means reining in the presidency,” she told the Boston Globe editorial board in October. Last week, Clinton said she would review every executive order issued by Bush and “rescind those that undermine the Constitution and betray the rule of law.”

As a senator, Clinton has taken a series of positions that put her on record as supporting limits on presidential authority — especially war powers. She has cosponsored a measure with Democrat Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia to end the authorization for the Iraq War, and she has repeatedly voted to set a timetable requiring the president to withdraw U.S. troops from the war she supported five years ago. She has also cosponsored a measure with Democrat Jim Webb of Virginia to prevent the president from taking military action against Iran without authorization from Congress.

BALANCING ACT: Clinton, leading nationally, campaigns Nov. 19 at the Bluegrass Cafe in Tama, Iowa. (GETTY IMAGES / DAVID LIENEMANN)

On the other hand, Clinton has said she believes in giving presidents broad authority to take military action. And she resisted disclosing information when she was first lady, a pattern her critics say is still in evidence with the delays in releasing the records of her husband’s presidency.

So Clinton’s attitude toward her own executive power, if she wins the presidency, will depend on whether her Senate experience truly has convinced her of the need for congressional oversight and limits on presidential authority — or whether it’s all anti-Bush posturing, a tune she will change as soon as her own presidency is on the line.

Even her Democratic colleagues, including the ones who have clashed the most with Bush over presidential powers, say they haven’t had a real discussion with Clinton about her views. “I haven’t, and I’m kicking myself now that I haven’t,” said Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Clinton has given a few hints about her approach to specific issues. At a candidates debate in Iowa on Dec. 13, she said she would use signing statements the way she says presidents used them in the past: not as “essentially a form of veto,” as Bush has, but “to clarify the law to perhaps make it more coherent with other laws that have been passed.”

Campaign spokesman Blake Zeff described Clinton as committed to a more open government than under Bush and willing to accommodate “legitimate congressional requests for information.” Clinton, he said, “believes there is an important but limited place for executive privilege to preserve the separation of powers.” Past battles, including those during her White House years, “simply are not comparable,” Zeff said, to Bush’s record of using executive privilege to maximize secrecy and resist congressional oversight.

Those who have worked closely with Clinton predict that her experiences in Congress and the White House would lead her to try to find a middle ground that serves the needs of the executive and legislative branches. Melanne Verveer, Clinton’s chief of staff when she was first lady, said Clinton would try to achieve a “meeting of the minds” to work out the inevitable conflicts.

“It’s not an either-or proposition,” said Verveer, now co-founder and chairman of the board of Vital Voices Global Partnership, which promotes the rise of women into leadership roles around the world. “It’s often not so black and white when you have experience in both branches.”

Leon E. Panetta, who was Bill Clinton’s second White House chief of staff, said Hillary Clinton would work well with Congress, particularly if it stays under Democratic control. But he predicted that she also would study the policy impact her husband was able to have through executive orders — bypassing the need for congressional approval — and set at least some limits on records to be turned over in any congressional investigations.

But current and former lawmakers who have clashed with her in the past say a Hillary Clinton presidency would not be a model of either openness, receptiveness to different views, or cooperation with congressional oversight.

“People can’t change their nature entirely,” said Democratic Rep. Jim Cooper of Tennessee, who drew Clinton’s wrath for sponsoring a rival health care plan when she was leading her husband’s health care overhaul effort in 1993. At one White House meeting, Cooper says he was later told, the first lady asked two senators to videotape attack ads against him.

Clinton has said on numerous occasions that her years in the White House made her sympathetic to presidents’ need for authority, especially on war powers. In her 2002 floor speech announcing that she would vote to authorize the Iraq War, Clinton said, “I want this president, or any future president, to be in the strongest possible position to lead our country in the United Nations or in war.”

There is no evidence that Clinton ever objected to her husband’s decision to launch the Kosovo air strikes in 1999 without congressional approval. But she has hinted that Congress, which was under Republican control at the time, should have endorsed the war. “I wish that the Congress had been, you know, more supportive of my husband when he did what he had to do in Bosnia and Kosovo and elsewhere,” she said in a December 2003 appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Since then, though, Clinton has become more involved in congressional efforts to force the Bush administration to end the Iraq War. In addition to supporting troop withdrawal timetables, Clinton and Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee, cosponsored legislation to force the Pentagon to brief Congress on its plans for troop withdrawals.

Zeff said that if elected, Clinton will “comply with the War Powers Resolution’s requirement of congressional approval” for military actions.

Her own reaction to oversight is a different matter. Open-government advocates give Bill Clinton credit for launching efforts to speed the declassification of government records, but the Clintons resisted disclosure of information about the first lady’s activities in the White House.

In 1993, during the health care overhaul effort, three groups sued the administration to require Clinton’s task force to comply with a 1972 open-meetings law, the Federal Advisory Committee Act. In response, the Clinton administration’s Justice Department called the law unconstitutional and insisted, unsuccessfully, that it should not apply to the task force — using arguments similar to those Vice President Dick Cheney would employ in 2002 to defend the secrecy of his energy task force.

Forcing the health care team to comply with the open-meetings law would “regulate the method by which the president obtains recommendations from his closest advisers” and “impair the president’s ability to exercise his constitutional power . . . to make legislative recommendations to Congress,” the Clinton Justice Department argued.

Two years later, Republican Rep. William F. Clinger of Pennsylvania, who chaired the panel then known as the Government Reform and Oversight Committee, tried to investigate Hillary Clinton’s role in the 1993 firing of several White House travel office employees. Republicans said the Clintons were just trying to shift the travel business to political friends on the outside and charged that the firings were a sign of cronyism. The White House claimed executive privilege, leading the committee to seek contempt charges against three administration officials.

“I certainly didn’t feel that the questions involved in the firings in the travel office rose to the level of executive privilege,” Clinger recalls. Eventually, the administration gave some members and their staffs access to the records, and Clinton gave the committee written answers in which she said she had no role in the firings. Though independent counsel Robert W. Ray concluded in his final report that she did have a role, he decided there wasn’t enough evidence to prove that she had lied.

Zeff dismissed the significance of the travel office battles. “We don’t think the American people are interested in revisiting the partisan Republican fishing expeditions of the 1990s,” he said.

Now, Clinton is taking heat from Democratic rival Barack Obama and others about the slow pace of the release of her husband’s official records by his presidential library in Little Rock, Ark. The former president has said he has tried to speed the release by asking the National Archives to consider records for possible withholding only in certain cases. And archives officials have said there’s not much more that the Clintons could do to speed up the process.

Cooper, however, doesn’t buy the argument that the process is out of the Clinton’s hands. “Give me a break,” he said, laughing and rolling his eyes.