A Nation At Stake
Afflicted as we obviously are by some collective national attention deficit disorder, things that matter often fall through the cracks. A few weeks ago many of us missed one of the most important speeches given in our lifetimes. It was televised but it ran after all on C-Span, and at the same time as the Golden Globe Awards one Sunday night. But we urge everyone who still honors and believes in our constitution and our democracy to go online, type in www.alternet.org/story/30905/ and read it for themselves.
The speech “A Constitutional Crisis” was delivered by former vice-president Al Gore, after an introduction by former Republican congressman Bob Barr, one of the country’s leading conservatives. In the past, the two basically disagreed on everything. But what they share today is the belief that our government under President Bush has moved to positions so extreme as to threaten not just our privacy and our most cherished civil rights, but the rule of law and the constitutional basis of American democracy, the separation of powers. They, like we, believe the issues at stake aren’t about politics, they’re about the survival of our founding father’s vision of a nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and so on, and nothing less.
“In spite of our differences over ideology and politics,” said Gore, “we are in strong agreement that the American values we hold most dear have been placed at serious risk by the unprecedented claims of the Administration to a truly breathtaking expansion of executive power…”
Most of us already understand that as Gore nicely put it, “Our government has been caught eavesdropping on huge numbers of American citizens and has brazenly declared that it has the unilateral right to continue.” But what’s equally clear now to many is that “the war on terror” has become a smokescreen both for a frontal assault on every American’s constitutional rights, and for the dismemberment of the checks and balances between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of our government. And if the Bush administration succeeds in convincing anyone that its radical new doctrine of the “unitary executive” represents something much different than what we used to call totalitarianism, then democracy in America will frankly become a thing of our past and not of our future. That in our view, is now a clear and present danger.
Only once before in our lifetimes has the subject of massive illegal surveillance of American citizens been raised publicly. That high crime and misdemeanor was laid out in 1974 in the second article of impeachment against Richard Nixon, who resigned before that trial began. But for those who’ve been following the breaking news stories only vaguely, here are some of the key issues of recent weeks:
President Bush claims he can imprison American citizens for the rest of their lives without an arrest warrant, and without telling them why they’re being held or notifying their families they’ve been incarcerated. He claims the authority to kidnap people in foreign countries, and deliver them for torture by foreign governments on our behalf. He signed, under protest, a law sponsored by Senator McCain to put a stop to such practices, while at the same time announcing he reserved the right not to comply with the law. Meanwhile it turns out that in direct contravention to the nearly 30 year-old statute requiring a court order for federal wiretaps and surveillance, for four years the administration has been illegally monitoring the phone calls and emails of hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of American citizens. During this time the president repeatedly assured the public that no such thing was happening and all constitutional safeguards were intact in the wake of 9/11 and the Patriot Act. That of course, turned out to be a huge lie, but once revealed, the President made no attempt to conceal it. Attorney General Gonzales in fact, admitted the administration knew perfectly well its use of the National Security Agency to spy on Americans was illegal, but rather than try and change the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act, they simply chose to break it instead.
At this point two lawsuits have been filed in federal court to try and end the Bush administration’s illegal spying on Americans, one by the ACLU and one by the Center for Constitutional Rights and the National Lawyers Guild. Where if anywhere these suits will go, no one knows. At stake is the rule of law in America, the federal judiciary is the court of last resort, and the basic issue is whether a president is free to pick and choose which laws assuring our civil liberties he wishes to obey and which he doesn’t. What’s especially troubling is the final decisions are being made by a President who can just barely and infrequently manage to cobble together a cogent thought in English on any subject, least of all this one.
As James Madison once said, “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many…may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” We believe in a nation of laws and respect for the rule of law. We believe in the balance of governmental powers, so brilliantly framed by our founding fathers. And while we pray that the federal courts will ultimately affirm both, we don’t know that they will, not with justices like Antonin Scalia and Sam Alito casting the deciding votes.
Thomas Jefferson told us that should we stray from our guiding principles “in moments of error or alarm, let us hasten to retrace our steps and to regain the road which alone leads to peace, liberty, and safety.” That we find ourselves at such a junction today is hardly in dispute. That we chose the right path now is up to us to decide but for our children and theirs to ultimately judge. And if we fail to leave them a legacy where freedom still means something, God help them.
BP