By David Nather, CQ Staff

As mayor of New York from 1994 through 2001, Rudy Giuliani won praise early on for sharply reducing the crime rate and, at the end, for his confident leadership after the devastation of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. It is the events that happened in between, however, that are prompting warnings from his critics that if he were elected president he would use executive power as expansively as President Bush has.

“It would be as if we had a tougher Cheney if Rudy Giuliani were elected as president,” said Frederick A.O. Schwartz, a senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s School of Law and co-author of “Unchecked and Unbalanced: Presidential Power in a Time of Terror.”

TOUGH-MINDED: Giuliani, a combative former New York mayor, speaks in Boca Raton, Fla., on Nov. 30. (GETTY IMAGES / JOE RAEDLE)

Eric Lane, a law professor at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y., says Giuliani “would be the person in the race who evidences the tendency the most. He has a very aggressive personality, and he thinks he’s right, and he thinks he’s right for everybody. And he tends not to have a lot of people around him who will challenge him.”

In 1999, the State Court of Appeals, New York’s highest court, slapped Giuliani down twice in one week for exceeding his authority. It ordered him to stop blocking the state comptroller, H. Carl McCall, from auditing six agencies to determine how well the city delivered services. And it stopped Giuliani’s plan to privatize Coney Island Hospital, ruling that the city could not lease it to a private company without getting the Legislature to change state law.

Earlier that year, the same views of executive authority that led Giuliani to crack down on minor crimes in the city — which ultimately helped bring the major crimes under control — led him to order police to seize cars from drivers who had been arrested for drunken driving. Even if a driver was acquitted of the charge, the city would have been able to go to civil court to confiscate the car permanently.

And in the days after the Sept. 11 attacks, with his second term set to conclude at the end of December, Giuliani proposed extending it by three months, arguing that extra time would allow him to do a better job easing the transition for his successor. He was forced to drop that idea when state Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, a Democrat, refused to consider any such legislation.

As David Greenberg, a historian at Rutgers University in neighboring New Jersey, sees it, “He really did try to aggregate as much power to the office as possible.”

The auditing incident illustrated another worrisome pattern, Giuliani’s critics say: an aversion to oversight. The mayor had tangled with McCall for two years, ordering agencies to stop sharing information with the comptroller and kicking auditors out of two agencies. The court battle took place after the city ignored 17 subpoenas McCall issued to obtain records from six agencies.

In 1998, Giuliani appointed a commission to revise the city’s charter that recommended, among other things, the abolishment of the Office of the Public Advocate and the Independent Budget Office — both of which were established as checks on the operations of city agencies.

And Giuliani didn’t take kindly to challenges from the City Council. In 1998, when Democratic council member Stephen DiBrienza sponsored legislation to relieve overcrowding at city homeless shelters by limiting the number of beds, Giuliani vetoed the bill, saying it encroached on his executive powers. If the council overrode the veto, he warned, he would build new shelters in the districts of any member who supported the measure.

The council overrode his veto, and, true to his word, Giuliani began eviction proceedings against a state-run psychiatric center to build a new shelter in DiBrienza’s district. In the face of terrible publicity, a deputy was dispatched to broker a deal, persuading the council to make the new limits apply only to new shelters.

“Giuliani, I believe to this day, is not a believer in the legislative process and the give-and-take of the democratic process,” said DiBrienza, who now lectures on public policy at Baruch College in New York. Moreover, he said, that attitude seemed to rub off on other members of Giuliani’s administration, who sometimes declined to show up for hearings and often refused to engage in debates when they did.

“You could win every which way — scientifically, mathematically, logically — and they would say, ‘OK, but we don’t want to do it that way,’ ” DiBrienza said.

Giuliani’s supporters, however, don’t think his record suggests someone who would be unable to work with the legislative branch. “He obviously was able to work with people, because otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to accomplish everything he was able to accomplish,” said Richard R. Tisei, the Republican leader of the Massachusetts Senate, who is supporting Giuliani over home-state candidate Mitt Romney because he thinks Romney dealt poorly with his state’s legislature.

In his presidential campaign, Giuliani has stayed well within the mainstream of the Republican Party on the issue of war powers, which speaks to his regard for legislative powers. When the Republican candidates were asked in an October debate whether they thought they would need congressional authorization for military action against Iran — a debate that took place before a new intelligence estimate concluded that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 — Giuliani said he was open to asking Congress, if there was time.

“It’s desirable, it’s safer to go to Congress, get approval from Congress,” Giuliani said. “If you’re really dealing with an exigent circumstance, then the president has to act in the best interests of the country.”

But Giuliani has also indicated that he wants to protect the executive authority Bush has gained for monitoring and interrogating suspected terrorists. In an article in the journal Foreign Affairs this fall, Giuliani declared that the United States should “not unrealistically limit electronic surveillance or legal interrogation.”

And he is already surrounding himself with advisers who are known for their beliefs in a strong presidency. Giuliani’s justice advisory committee includes prominent supporters of the unitary executive theory, including Theodore B. Olson, who was Bush’s first solicitor general, and Steven Calabresi, a constitutional law professor at Northwestern University and co-founder of the Federalist Society.

And one of his foreign policy advisers is Norman Podhoretz, the editor-at-large of Commentary magazine and the author, in June, of an article titled “The Case for Bombing Iran.” Podhoretz is no fan of the War Powers Resolution. In his memoir, “My Love Affair With America,” Podhoretz writes that in passing the 1973 law, “Congress had engaged in a bit of imperialistic expansion of its own at the expense of the presidency.”