Democracy itself is in grave danger , Part 5

[Guest guest]

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2004/06/24/gore_speech/index4.html

 

 

 

" Democracy itself is in grave danger " | Part 5

 

 

 

If the Congress becomes an enfeebled enabler to the executive, and the courts

become known for political calculations in their decisions, then the country

suffers. The kinds of unnatural, undemocratic activities in which this

administration has engaged, in order to aggrandize power, have included

censorship of scientific reports, manipulation of budgetary statistics,

silencing dissent, and ignoring intelligence. Although there have been other

efforts by other presidents to encroach on the legitimate prerogatives of

Congress and courts, there has never been this kind of systematic abuse of the

truth and institutionalization of dishonesty as a routine part of the policy

process.

 

 

Two hundred and twenty years ago, John Adams wrote, in describing one of

America's most basic founding principles, " The executive shall never exercise

the legislative and judicial powers, or either of them ... to the end it may be

a government of laws and not of men. "

document.write('');

The last time we had a president who had the idea that he was above the law was

when Richard Nixon told an interviewer, " When the president does it, that means

that it is not illegal ... If the president, for example, approves something,

approves an action because of national security, or, in this case, because of a

threat to internal peace and order, of significant order, then the president's

decision in this instance is one that enables those who carry it out to carry it

out without violating the law. "

 

 

Fortunately for our country, Nixon was forced to resign as president before he

could implement his outlandish interpretation of the Constitution, but not

before his defiance of the Congress and the courts created a serious

constitutional crisis.

 

The two top Justice Department officials under President Nixon, Elliot

Richardson and William Ruckelshaus, turned out to be men of great integrity, and

even though they were loyal Republicans, they were more loyal to the

Constitution and resigned on principle rather than implement what they saw as

abuses of power by Nixon. Then Congress, also on a bipartisan basis, bravely

resisted Nixon's abuse of power and launched impeachment proceedings.

 

In some ways, our current president is actually claiming significantly more

extra-constitutional power, vis-à-vis Congress and the courts, than Nixon did.

For example, Nixon never claimed that he could imprison American citizens

indefinitely without charging them with a crime and without letting them see a

lawyer or notify their families. And this time, the attorney general, John

Ashcroft, is hardly the kind of man who would resign on principle to impede an

abuse of power. In fact, whenever there is an opportunity to abuse power in this

administration, Ashcroft seems to be leading the charge. And it is Ashcroft who

picked the staff lawyers at Justice responsible for the embarrassing memos

justifying and enabling torture.

 

Moreover, in sharp contrast to the courageous 93rd Congress that saved the

country from Richard Nixon's sinister abuses, the current Congress has virtually

abdicated its constitutional role to serve as an independent and coequal branch

of government.

 

Instead, this Republican-led Congress is content, for the most part, to take

orders from the president on what they vote for and what they don't vote for.

The Republican leaders of the House and Senate have even started blocking

Democrats from attending conference committee meetings, where legislation takes

its final form, and instead, they let the president's staff come to the meetings

and write key parts of the laws for them. (Come to think of it, the decline and

lack of independence shown by this Congress would shock our founders more than

anything else, because they believed that the power of the Congress was the most

important check and balance against the unhealthy exercise of too much power by

the Executive branch.)

 

This administration has not been content just to reduce the Congress to

subservience. It has also engaged in unprecedented secrecy, denying the American

people access to crucial information with which they might hold government

officials accountable for their actions, and a systematic effort to manipulate

and intimidate the media into presenting a more favorable image of the

administration to the American people.

 

Listen to what U.S. News and World Report has to say about their secrecy: " The

Bush administration has quietly but efficiently dropped a shroud of secrecy

across many critical operations of the federal government -- cloaking its own

affairs from scrutiny and removing from the public domain important information

on health, safety, and environmental matters. "

 

Here are just a few examples, and for each one, you have to ask, what are they

hiding, and why are they hiding it?

 

More than 6,000 documents have been removed by the Bush administration from

governmental Web sites. To cite only one example, a document on the EPA Web site

giving citizens crucial information on how to identify chemical hazards to their

families. Some have speculated that the principle threat to the Bush

administration is a threat by the chemical hazards if the information remains

available to American citizens.

 

To head off complaints from our nation's governors over how much they receive

under federal programs, the Bush administration simply stopped printing the

primary state budget report.

 

To muddy the clear consensus of the scientific community on global warming, the

White House directed major changes and deletions to an EPA report that were so

egregious that the agency said it was too embarrassed to use the language.

 

They've kept hidden from view Cheney's ultra-secret energy task force. They have

fought a pitched battle in the courts for more than three years to continue

denying the American people the ability to know which special interests and

lobbyists advised with Vice President Cheney on the design of the new laws.

 

And when mass layoffs became too embarrassing they simply stopped publishing the

regular layoff report that economists and others have been receiving for

decades. For this administration, the truth hurts, when the truth is available

to the American people. They find bliss in the ignorance of the people. What are

they hiding, and why are they hiding it?

 

In the end, for this administration, it is all about power. This lie about the

invented connection between al-Qaida and Iraq was and is the key to justifying

the current ongoing constitutional power grab by the president. So long as their

big flamboyant lie remains an established fact in the public's mind, President

Bush will be seen as justified in taking for himself the power to make war on

his whim. He will be seen as justified in acting to selectively suspend civil

liberties -- again on his personal discretion -- and he will continue to

intimidate the press and thereby distort the political reality experienced by

the American people during his bid for re-election.

 

War is lawful violence, but even in its midst we acknowledge the need for rules.

We know that in our wars there have been descents from these standards, often

the result of spontaneous anger arising out of the passion of battle. But we

have never before, to my knowledge, had a situation in which the framework for

this kind of violence has been created by the president, nor have we had a

situation where these things were mandated by directives signed by the secretary

of defense, as it is alleged, and supported by the national security advisor.

 

Always before, we could look to the chief executive as the point from which

redress would come and law be upheld. That was one of the great prides of our

country: humane leadership, faithful to the law. What we have now, however, is

the result of decisions taken by a president and an administration for whom the

best law is NO law, so long as law threatens to constrain their political will.

And where the constraints of law cannot be prevented or eliminated, then they

maneuver it to be weakened by evasion, by delay, by hair-splitting, by

obstruction, and by failure to enforce on the part of those sworn to uphold the

law.

 

In these circumstances, we need investigation of the facts under oath, and in

the face of penalties for evasion and perjury. We need investigation by an

aroused Congress whose bipartisan members know they stand before the judgment of

history. We cannot depend upon a debased Department of Justice given over to the

hands of zealots. " Congressional oversight " and " special prosecution " are words

that should hang in the air. If our honor as a nation is to be restored, it is

not by allowing the mighty to shield themselves by bringing the law to bear

against their pawns: it is by bringing the law to bear against the mighty

themselves. Our dignity and honor as a nation never came from our perfection as

a society or as a people: it came from the belief that in the end, this was a

country which would pursue justice as the compass pursues the pole: that

although we might deviate, we would return and find our path. This is what we

must now do.