Brave New World
Almost a month ago, on May 9, President Bush signed a joint National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive known as NSPD 51, establishing a “comprehensive national policy on the continuity of Federal Government structures and operations.” Under it and in a “catastrophic emergency” like a terrorist attack or a natural disaster, all governmental power would be placed in the hands of the President. As for the formerly coequal legislative and judicial branches of our government, as a matter of “comity” or courtesy, the president would decide what level of their ongoing involvement would be “proper.”
In Washingtonspeak of recent years, this order is the institutionalization of the legal doctrine of the “Unitary Executive,” and it now awaits only another 9-11 type event to trigger it. Simply put, this directive is the radical, ultra-right wing theory of how our government’s REALLY supposed to work, and it’s a view held by Supreme Court Justices Alito and Thomas and the members and supporters of the ultra-conservative Federalist Society that now appear to run our nation’s Justice Department. This theory which President Bush has now referenced over 150 times in his signing statements and executive orders and which entered the public lexicon less than two weeks after 9-11, is now law. We believe it portends the end of our constitutionally guaranteed separation of powers, and the checks and balances against the abuse of governmental authority that have served our nation so critically since 1787.
We update you on NSPD 51 because it’s our job to tell you, because you do probably need to know, and because your other sources of news most assuredly didn’t tell you. If you want to read it for yourself, it’s at www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/05/200770509-12.html. Whether anyone can do anything about it at this point isn’t clear. But we all need to understand what is happening to our democracy just the same, as well as who’s doing it and why. Those who’ve been attentive in recent years have seen it coming in the creation of the Patriot Act and the Permanent War, in the suspension of our civil liberties, the arrival of warrentless wiretapping and a host of formerly unthinkable practices, and in the brutally partisan politicization of our government that’s shocked even the most jaded Washington types of late.
Some of you may remember that two years ago we were one of the first newspapers in the country to break the “Downing Street Memos” story, where British intelligence confirmed to Prime Minister Blair that the US fabricated the purported existence of WMD’s in Iraq to justifiy invading that country. We brought you that story for the same reasons as we do this one. Also like with this one, to challenge you to analyze what you do read better and to think about what you don’t read or see at all in most places where you look for news. So to the extent that our job sometimes makes us canaries in the mine, we accept the role. But if you wake up one day and realize America may no longer be what you thought it was, don’t say you weren’t told. One thing’s for sure, most of the media we rely on isn’t likely to do much of a job of clueing us in.
So anyway and moving right along, it’s into this world of grown-ups-just-barely holding-things-together that we welcome all of our high school and college graduates this June. We wish we could report that the place you’re arriving to help take over is in better shape, unfortunately it is what it is, and it’s partly at least, our fault and partly as good as it is for the same reason. Your assignment, should you decide to accept it, is to make it better. You could do this for any number of reasons either self-interested or altruistic but either way, you’re going to have to do something. Like your families probably, we hope you’re going to do something great like turn out to be a really nice person, do good stuff, raise families one day, and so on. If you’re going off somewhere, this will always be home and a great place to be from. If you’re staying right here, that’s great too ‘cause we need you, and not just to fix the household electronics.
Of course, we want you to have a good time and act your age only a little more mature, and not be surly and grumpy like the rest of us older farts sometimes get. And we expect you to be smarter than us so don’t let us down on this one ‘cause if you’re not, then what was the point of the whole exercise anyway? But regardless, we do expect you to respect yourselves and each other, and to take care of each other. Go ahead, call us tough parents or newspaper people or whatever. We’re all just doing the best we can, and that’s all any of us can ask of you. So go do something good. We’ll wait. We’re not going anywhere.
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