Al Gore indicted the Bush administration’s “unprecedented
claims to a truly breathtaking expansion of executive power.” Speaking of
Bush’s domestic spying program, he said that “what we do know about this
pervasive wiretapping virtually compels the conclusion that the President) has
been breaking the law repeatedly and persistently.” Gore gave four compelling
reasons why we are in for “something more than another cycle of overreach and
regret.”
And he said this: “If the pattern of practice begun by this
administration is not challenged, it may well become a permanent part of the
American system.”
Can you come to grips with this and NOT act? Can you know the truth of what is going on
and NOT do everything you can to build the BUSH STEP DOWN protests planned for
January 31 and February 4?
Shakespeare said that there is a tide in the affairs of men.
With the Alito nomination, the wiretap scandal, and the new crisis with Iran,
that tide is now raging. Bush will try to use his State of the Union address on
January 31 to turn the current decisively his way. If there are not thousands
and thousands saying BUSH STEP DOWN at the tops of their voices, he may well
succeed. For us to fail to act is to invite disaster.
On the other hand, to act now ( to take up the challenge (
could make all the difference. There is a tide, but that tide can be turned.
If we don’t want the future that the Bush regime is jamming
down our throats, we can do something about it. There are millions who are agonizing. Reach out to them. Now. Volunteer. Donate.
Be there. Join us.
The world truly cannot wait. BUSH STEP DOWN.
US Constitution in Grave Danger
Speech by Al Gore given Monday, January 16, 2006
The following is the transcript as prepared for
delivery.
Congressman Barr and I have disagreed many times over the years, but we
have joined together today with thousands of our fellow
citizens-Democrats and Republicans alike-to express our shared concern
that America’s Constitution is in grave danger.
In spite of our differences over ideology and politics, 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.
As we begin this new year, the Executive Branch of our government has
been caught eavesdropping on huge numbers of American citizens and has
brazenly declared that it has the unilateral right to continue without
regard to the established law enacted by Congress to prevent such abuses.
It is imperative that respect for the rule of law be restored.
So, many of us have come here to Constitution Hall to sound an alarm and
call upon our fellow citizens to put aside partisan differences and join
with us in demanding that our Constitution be defended and preserved.
It is appropriate that we make this appeal on the day our nation has set
aside to honor the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who
challenged America to breathe new life into our oldest values by
extending its promise to all our people.
On this particular Martin Luther King Day, it is especially important to
recall that for the last several years of his life, Dr. King was
illegally wiretapped-one of hundreds of thousands of Americans whose
private communications were intercepted by the U.S. government during
this period.
The FBI privately called King the “most dangerous and effective negro
leader in the country” and vowed to “take him off his pedestal.”
The
government even attempted to destroy his marriage and blackmail him into
committing suicide.
This campaign continued until Dr. King’s murder. The discovery that the
FBI conducted a long-running and extensive campaign of secret electronic
surveillance designed to infiltrate the inner workings of the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference, and to learn the most intimate details
of Dr. King’s life, helped to convince Congress to enact restrictions on
wiretapping.
The result was the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act (FISA),
which was enacted expressly to ensure that foreign intelligence
surveillance would be presented to an impartial judge to verify that
there is a sufficient cause for the surveillance. I voted for that law
during my first term in Congress and for almost thirty years the system
has proven a workable and valued means of according a level of
protection for private citizens, while permitting foreign surveillance
to continue.
Yet, just one month ago, Americans awoke to the shocking news that in
spite of this long settled law, the Executive Branch has been secretly
spying on large numbers of Americans for the last four years and
eavesdropping on “large volumes of telephone calls, e-mail messages, and
other Internet traffic inside the United States.” The New York Times
reported that the President decided to launch this massive eavesdropping
program “without search warrants or any new laws that would permit such
domestic intelligence collection.”
During the period when this eavesdropping was still secret, the
President went out of his way to reassure the American people on more
than one occasion that, of course, judicial permission is required for
any government spying on American citizens and that, of course, these
constitutional safeguards were still in place.
But surprisingly, the President’s soothing statements turned out to be
false. Moreover, as soon as this massive domestic spying program was
uncovered by the press, the President not only confirmed that the story
was true, but also declared that he has no intention of bringing these
wholesale invasions of privacy to an end.
At present, we still have much to learn about the NSA’s domestic
surveillance. What we do know about this pervasive wiretapping virtually
compels the conclusion that the President of the United States has been
breaking the law repeatedly and persistently.
A president who breaks the law is a threat to the very structure of our
government. Our Founding Fathers were adamant that they had established
a government of laws and not men. Indeed, they recognized that the
structure of government they had enshrined in our Constitution – our
system of checks and balances – was designed with a central purpose of
ensuring that it would govern through the rule of law. As John Adams
said: “The executive shall never exercise the legislative and judicial
powers, or either of them, to the end that it may be a government of
laws and not of men.”
An executive who arrogates to himself the power to ignore the legitimate
legislative directives of the Congress or to act free of the check of
the judiciary becomes the central threat that the Founders sought to
nullify in the Constitution – an all-powerful executive too reminiscent
of the King from whom they had broken free. In the words of James
Madison, “the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and
judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and
whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be
pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”
Thomas Paine, whose pamphlet, “On Common Sense” ignited the American
Revolution, succinctly described America’s alternative. Here, he said,
we intended to make certain that “the law is king.”
Vigilant adherence to the rule of law strengthens our democracy and
strengthens America. It ensures that those who govern us operate within
our constitutional structure, which means that our democratic
institutions play their indispensable role in shaping policy and
determining the direction of our nation. It means that the people of
this nation ultimately determine its course and not executive officials
operating in secret without constraint.
The rule of law makes us stronger by ensuring that decisions will be
tested, studied, reviewed and examined through the processes of
government that are designed to improve policy. And the knowledge that
they will be reviewed prevents over-reaching and checks the accretion of
power.
A commitment to openness, truthfulness and accountability also helps our
country avoid many serious mistakes. Recently, for example, we learned
from recently classified declassified documents that the Gulf of Tonkin
Resolution, which authorized the tragic Vietnam war, was actually based
on false information. We now know that the decision by Congress to
authorize the Iraq War, 38 years later, was also based on false
information. America would have been better off knowing the truth and
avoiding both of these colossal mistakes in our history. Following the
rule of law makes us safer, not more vulnerable.
The President and I agree on one thing. The threat from terrorism is all
too real. There is simply no question that we continue to face new
challenges in the wake of the attack on September 11th and that we must
be ever-vigilant in protecting our citizens from harm.
Where we disagree is that we have to break the law or sacrifice our
system of government to protect Americans from terrorism. In fact, doing
so makes us weaker and more vulnerable.
Once violated, the rule of law is in danger. Unless stopped, lawlessness
grows. The greater the power of the executive grows, the more difficult
it becomes for the other branches to perform their constitutional roles.
As the executive acts outside its constitutionally prescribed role and
is able to control access to information that would expose its actions,
it becomes increasingly difficult for the other branches to police it.
Once that ability is lost, democracy itself is threatened and we become
a government of men and not laws.
The President’s men have minced words about America’s laws. The Attorney
General openly conceded that the “kind of surveillance” we now know
they
have been conducting requires a court order unless authorized by
statute. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act self-evidently does
not authorize what the NSA has been doing, and no one inside or outside
the Administration claims that it does. Incredibly, the Administration
claims instead that the surveillance was implicitly authorized when
Congress voted to use force against those who attacked us on September 11th.
This argument just does not hold any water. Without getting into the
legal intricacies, it faces a number of embarrassing facts. First,
another admission by the Attorney General: he concedes that the
Administration knew that the NSA project was prohibited by existing law
and that they consulted with some members of Congress about changing the
statute. Gonzalez says that they were told this probably would not be
possible. So how can they now argue that the Authorization for the Use
of Military Force somehow implicitly authorized it all along? Second,
when the Authorization was being debated, the Administration did in fact
seek to have language inserted in it that would have authorized them to
use military force domestically – and the Congress did not agree.
Senator Ted Stevens and Representative Jim McGovern, among others, made
statements during the Authorization debate clearly restating that that
Authorization did not operate domestically.
When President Bush failed to convince Congress to give him all the
power he wanted when they passed the AUMF, he secretly assumed that
power anyway, as if congressional authorization was a useless bother.
But as Justice Frankfurter once wrote: “To find authority so explicitly
withheld is not merely to disregard in a particular instance the clear
will of Congress. It is to disrespect the whole legislative process and
the constitutional division of authority between President and Congress.”
This is precisely the “disrespect” for the law that the Supreme Court
struck down in the steel seizure case.
It is this same disrespect for America’s Constitution which has now
brought our republic to the brink of a dangerous breach in the fabric of
the Constitution. And the disrespect embodied in these apparent mass
violations of the law is part of a larger pattern of seeming
indifference to the Constitution that is deeply troubling to millions of
Americans in both political parties.
For example, the President has also declared that he has a heretofore
unrecognized inherent power to seize and imprison any American citizen
that he alone determines to be a threat to our nation, and that,
notwithstanding his American citizenship, the person imprisoned has no
right to talk with a lawyer-even to argue that the President or his
appointees have made a mistake and imprisoned the wrong person.
The President claims that he can imprison American citizens indefinitely
for the rest of their lives without an arrest warrant, without notifying
them about what charges have been filed against them, and without
informing their families that they have been imprisoned.
At the same time, the Executive Branch has claimed a previously
unrecognized authority to mistreat prisoners in its custody in ways that
plainly constitute torture in a pattern that has now been documented in
U.S. facilities located in several countries around the world.
Over 100 of these captives have reportedly died while being tortured by
Executive Branch interrogators and many more have been broken and
humiliated. In the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, investigators who
documented the pattern of torture estimated that more than 90 percent of
the victims were innocent of any charges.
This shameful exercise of power overturns a set of principles that our
nation has observed since General Washington first enunciated them
during our Revolutionary War and has been observed by every president
since then – until now. These practices violate the Geneva Conventions
and the International Convention Against Torture, not to mention our own
laws against torture.
The President has also claimed that he has the authority to kidnap
individuals in foreign countries and deliver them for imprisonment and
interrogation on our behalf by autocratic regimes in nations that are
infamous for the cruelty of their techniques for torture.
Some of our traditional allies have been shocked by these new practices
on the part of our nation. The British Ambassador to Uzbekistan – one of
those nations with the worst reputations for torture in its prisons –
registered a complaint to his home office about the senselessness and
cruelty of the new U.S. practice: “This material is useless – we are
selling our souls for dross. It is in fact positively harmful.”
Can it be true that any president really has such powers under our
Constitution? If the answer is “yes” then under the theory by which
these acts are committed, are there any acts that can on their face be
prohibited? If the President has the inherent authority to eavesdrop,
imprison citizens on his own declaration, kidnap and torture, then what
can’t he do?
The Dean of Yale Law School, Harold Koh, said after analyzing the
Executive Branch’s claims of these previously unrecognized powers: “If
the President has commander-in-chief power to commit torture, he has the
power to commit genocide, to sanction slavery, to promote apartheid, to
license summary execution.”
The fact that our normal safeguards have thus far failed to contain this
unprecedented expansion of executive power is deeply troubling. This
failure is due in part to the fact that the Executive Branch has
followed a determined strategy of obfuscating, delaying, withholding
information, appearing to yield but then refusing to do so and
dissembling in order to frustrate the efforts of the legislative and
judicial branches to restore our constitutional balance.
For example, after appearing to support legislation sponsored by John
McCain to stop the continuation of torture, the President declared in
the act of signing the bill that he reserved the right not to comply
with it.
Similarly, the Executive Branch claimed that it could unilaterally
imprison American citizens without giving them access to review by any
tribunal. The Supreme Court disagreed, but the President engaged in
legal maneuvers designed to prevent the Court from providing meaningful
content to the rights of its citizens.
A conservative jurist on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals wrote that
the Executive Branch’s handling of one such case seemed to involve the
sudden abandonment of principle “at substantial cost to the government’s
credibility before the courts.”
As a result of its unprecedented claim of new unilateral power, the
Executive Branch has now put our constitutional design at grave risk.
The stakes for America’s representative democracy are far higher than
has been generally recognized.
These claims must be rejected and a healthy balance of power restored to
our Republic. Otherwise, the fundamental nature of our democracy may
well undergo a radical transformation.
For more than two centuries, America’s freedoms have been preserved in
part by our founders’ wise decision to separate the aggregate power of
our government into three co-equal branches, each of which serves to
check and balance the power of the other two.
On more than a few occasions, the dynamic interaction among all three
branches has resulted in collisions and temporary impasses that create
what are invariably labeled “constitutional crises.” These crises
have
often been dangerous and uncertain times for our Republic. But in each
such case so far, we have found a resolution of the crisis by renewing
our common agreement to live under the rule of law.
The principle alternative to democracy throughout history has been the
consolidation of virtually all state power in the hands of a single
strongman or small group who together exercise that power without the
informed consent of the governed.
It was in revolt against just such a regime, after all, that America was
founded. When Lincoln declared at the time of our greatest crisis that
the ultimate question being decided in the Civil War was “whether that
nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure,”
he was not only saving our union but also was recognizing the fact that
democracies are rare in history. And when they fail, as did Athens and
the Roman Republic upon whose designs our founders drew heavily, what
emerges in their place is another strongman regime.
There have of course been other periods of American history when the
Executive Branch claimed new powers that were later seen as excessive
and mistaken. Our second president, John Adams, passed the infamous
Alien and Sedition Acts and sought to silence and imprison critics and
political opponents.
When his successor, Thomas Jefferson, eliminated the abuses he said:
“[The essential principles of our Government] form the bright
constellation which has gone before us and guided our steps through an
age of revolution and reformation… [S]hould we wander from them in
moments of error or of alarm, let us hasten to retrace our steps and to
regain the road which alone leads to peace, liberty and safety.”
Our greatest President, Abraham Lincoln, suspended habeas corpus during
the Civil War. Some of the worst abuses prior to those of the current
administration were committed by President Wilson during and after WWI
with the notorious Red Scare and Palmer Raids. The internment of
Japanese Americans during WWII marked a low point for the respect of
individual rights at the hands of the executive. And, during the Vietnam
War, the notorious COINTELPRO program was part and parcel of the abuses
experienced by Dr. King and thousands of others.
But in each of these cases, when the conflict and turmoil subsided, the
country recovered its equilibrium and absorbed the lessons learned in a
recurring cycle of excess and regret.
There are reasons for concern this time around that conditions may be
changing and that the cycle may not repeat itself. For one thing, we
have for decades been witnessing the slow and steady accumulation of
presidential power. In a global environment of nuclear weapons and cold
war tensions, Congress and the American people accepted ever enlarging
spheres of presidential initiative to conduct intelligence and counter
intelligence activities and to allocate our military forces on the
global stage. When military force has been used as an instrument of
foreign policy or in response to humanitarian demands, it has almost
always been as the result of presidential initiative and leadership. As
Justice Frankfurter wrote in the Steel Seizure Case, “The accretion of
dangerous power does not come in a day. It does come, however slowly,
from the generative force of unchecked disregard of the restrictions
that fence in even the most disinterested assertion of authority.”
A second reason to believe we may be experiencing something new is that
we are told by the Administration that the war footing upon which he has
tried to place the country is going to “last for the rest of our lives.”
So we are told that the conditions of national threat that have been
used by other Presidents to justify arrogations of power will persist in
near perpetuity.
Third, we need to be aware of the advances in eavesdropping and
surveillance technologies with their capacity to sweep up and analyze
enormous quantities of information and to mine it for intelligence. This
adds significant vulnerability to the privacy and freedom of enormous
numbers of innocent people at the same time as the potential power of
those technologies. These techologies have the potential for shifting
the balance of power between the apparatus of the state and the freedom
of the individual in ways both subtle and profound.
Don’t misunderstand me: the threat of additional terror strikes is all
too real and their concerted efforts to acquire weapons of mass
destruction does create a real imperative to exercise the powers of the
Executive Branch with swiftness and agility. Moreover, there is in fact
an inherent power that is conferred by the Constitution to the President
to take unilateral action to protect the nation from a sudden and
immediate threat, but it is simply not possible to precisely define in
legalistic terms exactly when that power is appropriate and when it is not.
But the existence of that inherent power cannot be used to justify a
gross and excessive power grab lasting for years that produces a serious
imbalance in the relationship between the executive and the other two
branches of government.
There is a final reason to worry that we may be experiencing something
more than just another cycle of overreach and regret. This
Administration has come to power in the thrall of a legal theory that
aims to convince us that this excessive concentration of presidential
authority is exactly what our Constitution intended.
This legal theory, which its proponents call the theory of the unitary
executive but which is more accurately described as the unilateral
executive, threatens to expand the president’s powers until the contours
of the constitution that the Framers actually gave us become obliterated
beyond all recognition. Under this theory, the President’s authority
when acting as Commander-in-Chief or when making foreign policy cannot
be reviewed by the judiciary or checked by Congress. President Bush has
pushed the implications of this idea to its maximum by continually
stressing his role as Commander-in-Chief, invoking it has frequently as
he can, conflating it with his other roles, domestic and foreign. When
added to the idea that we have entered a perpetual state of war, the
implications of this theory stretch quite literally as far into the
future as we can imagine.
This effort to rework America’s carefully balanced constitutional design
into a lopsided structure dominated by an all powerful Executive Branch
with a subservient Congress and judiciary is – ironically – accompanied by
an effort by the same administration to rework America’s foreign policy
from one that is based primarily on U.S. moral authority into one that
is based on a misguided and self-defeating effort to establish dominance
in the world.
The common denominator seems to be based on an instinct to intimidate
and control.
This same pattern has characterized the effort to silence dissenting
views within the Executive Branch, to censor information that may be
inconsistent with its stated ideological goals, and to demand conformity
from all Executive Branch employees.
For example, CIA analysts who strongly disagreed with the White House
assertion that Osama bin Laden was linked to Saddam Hussein found
themselves under pressure at work and became fearful of losing
promotions and salary increases.
Ironically, that is exactly what happened to FBI officials in the 1960s
who disagreed with J. Edgar Hoover’s view that Dr. King was closely
connected to Communists. The head of the FBI’s domestic intelligence
division said that his effort to tell the truth about King’s innocence
of the charge resulted in he and his colleagues becoming isolated and
pressured. “It was evident that we had to change our ways or we would
all be out on the street…. The men and I discussed how to get out of
trouble. To be in trouble with Mr. Hoover was a serious matter. These
men were trying to buy homes, mortgages on homes, children in school.
They lived in fear of getting transferred, losing money on their homes,
as they usually did. … so they wanted another memorandum written to
get us out of the trouble that we were in.”
The Constitution’s framers understood this dilemma as well, as Alexander
Hamilton put it, “a power over a man’s support is a power over his
will.” (Federalist No. 73)
Soon, there was no more difference of opinion within the FBI. The false
accusation became the unanimous view. In exactly the same way, George
Tenet’s CIA eventually joined in endorsing a manifestly false view that
there was a linkage between al Qaeda and the government of Iraq.
In the words of George Orwell: “We are all capable of believing things
which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong,
impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right.
Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an
indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false
belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”
Whenever power is unchecked and unaccountable it almost inevitably leads
to mistakes and abuses. In the absence of rigorous accountability,
incompetence flourishes. Dishonesty is encouraged and rewarded.
Last week, for example, Vice President Cheney attempted to defend the
Administration’s eavesdropping on American citizens by saying that if it
had conducted this program prior to 9/11, they would have found out the
names of some of the hijackers.
Tragically, he apparently still doesn’t know that the Administration did
in fact have the names of at least 2 of the hijackers well before 9/11
and had available to them information that could have easily led to the
identification of most of the other hijackers. And yet, because of
incompetence in the handling of this information, it was never used to
protect the American people.
It is often the case that an Executive Branch beguiled by the pursuit of
unchecked power responds to its own mistakes by reflexively proposing
that it be given still more power. Often, the request itself it used to
mask accountability for mistakes in the use of power it already has.
Moreover, if the pattern of practice begun by this Administration is not
challenged, it may well become a permanent part of the American system.
Many conservatives have pointed out that granting unchecked power to
this President means that the next President will have unchecked power
as well. And the next President may be someone whose values and belief
you do not trust. And this is why Republicans as well as Democrats
should be concerned with what this President has done. If this
President’s attempt to dramatically expand executive power goes
unquestioned, our constitutional design of checks and balances will be
lost. And the next President or some future President will be able, in
the name of national security, to restrict our liberties in a way the
framers never would have thought possible.
The same instinct to expand its power and to establish dominance
characterizes the relationship between this Administration and the
courts and the Congress.
In a properly functioning system, the Judicial Branch would serve as the
constitutional umpire to ensure that the branches of government observed
their proper spheres of authority, observed civil liberties and adhered
to the rule of law. Unfortunately, the unilateral executive has tried
hard to thwart the ability of the judiciary to call balls and strikes by
keeping controversies out of its hands – notably those challenging its
ability to detain individuals without legal process – by appointing
judges who will be deferential to its exercise of power and by its
support of assaults on the independence of the third branch.
The President’s decision to ignore FISA was a direct assault on the
power of the judges who sit on that court. Congress established the FISA
court precisely to be a check on executive power to wiretap. Yet, to
ensure that the court could not function as a check on executive power,
the President simply did not take matters to it and did not let the
court know that it was being bypassed.
The President’s judicial appointments are clearly designed to ensure
that the courts will not serve as an effective check on executive power.
As we have all learned, Judge Alito is a longtime supporter of a
powerful executive – a supporter of the so-called unitary executive,
which is more properly called the unilateral executive. Whether you
support his confirmation or not – and I do not – we must all agree that
he will not vote as an effective check on the expansion of executive
power. Likewise, Chief Justice Roberts has made plain his deference to
the expansion of executive power through his support of judicial
deference to executive agency rulemaking.
And the Administration has supported the assault on judicial
independence that has been conducted largely in Congress. That assault
includes a threat by the Republican majority in the Senate to
permanently change the rules to eliminate the right of the minority to
engage in extended debate of the President’s judicial nominees. The
assault has extended to legislative efforts to curtail the jurisdiction
of courts in matters ranging from habeas corpus to the pledge of
allegiance. In short, the Administration has demonstrated its contempt
for the judicial role and sought to evade judicial review of its actions
at every turn.
But the most serious damage has been done to the legislative branch. The
sharp decline of congressional power and autonomy in recent years has
been almost as shocking as the efforts by the Executive Branch to attain
a massive expansion of its power.
I was elected to Congress in 1976 and served eight years in the house, 8
years in the Senate and presided over the Senate for 8 years as Vice
President. As a young man, I saw the Congress first hand as the son of a
Senator. My father was elected to Congress in 1938, 10 years before I
was born, and left the Senate in 1971.
The Congress we have today is unrecognizable compared to the one in
which my father served. There are many distinguished Senators and
Congressmen serving today. I am honored that some of them are here in
this hall. But the legislative branch of government under its current
leadership now operates as if it is entirely subservient to the
Executive Branch.
Moreover, too many Members of the House and Senate now feel compelled to
spend a majority of their time not in thoughtful debate of the issues,
but raising money to purchase 30 second TV commercials.
There have now been two or three generations of congressmen who don’t
really know what an oversight hearing is. In the 70’s and 80’s, the
oversight hearings in which my colleagues and I participated held the
feet of the Executive Branch to the fire – no matter which party was in
power. Yet oversight is almost unknown in the Congress today.
The role of authorization committees has declined into insignificance.
The 13 annual appropriation bills are hardly ever actually passed
anymore. Everything is lumped into a single giant measure that is not
even available for Members of Congress to read before they vote on it.
Members of the minority party are now routinely excluded from conference
committees, and amendments are routinely not allowed during floor
consideration of legislation.
In the United States Senate, which used to pride itself on being the
“greatest deliberative body in the world,” meaningful debate is now
a
rarity. Even on the eve of the fateful vote to authorize the invasion of
Iraq, Senator Robert Byrd famously asked: “Why is this chamber empty?”
In the House of Representatives, the number who face a genuinely
competitive election contest every two years is typically less than a
dozen out of 435.
And too many incumbents have come to believe that the key to continued
access to the money for re-election is to stay on the good side of those
who have the money to give; and, in the case of the majority party, the
whole process is largely controlled by the incumbent president and his
political organization.
So the willingness of Congress to challenge the Administration is
further limited when the same party controls both Congress and the
Executive Branch.
The Executive Branch, time and again, has co-opted Congress’ role, and
often Congress has been a willing accomplice in the surrender of its own
power.
Look for example at the Congressional role in “overseeing” this massive
four year eavesdropping campaign that on its face seemed so clearly to
violate the Bill of Rights. The President says he informed Congress, but
what he really means is that he talked with the chairman and ranking
member of the House and Senate intelligence committees and the top
leaders of the House and Senate. This small group, in turn, claimed that
they were not given the full facts, though at least one of the
intelligence committee leaders handwrote a letter of concern to VP
Cheney and placed a copy in his own safe.
Though I sympathize with the awkward position in which these men and
women were placed, I cannot disagree with the Liberty Coalition when it
says that Democrats as well as Republicans in the Congress must share
the blame for not taking action to protest and seek to prevent what they
consider a grossly unconstitutional program.
Moreover, in the Congress as a whole – both House and Senate – the enhanced
role of money in the re-election process, coupled with the sharply
diminished role for reasoned deliberation and debate, has produced an
atmosphere conducive to pervasive institutionalized corruption.
The Abramoff scandal is but the tip of a giant iceberg that threatens
the integrity of the entire legislative branch of government.
It is the pitiful state of our legislative branch which primarily
explains the failure of our vaunted checks and balances to prevent the
dangerous overreach by our Executive Branch which now threatens a
radical transformation of the American system.
I call upon Democratic and Republican members of Congress today to
uphold your oath of office and defend the Constitution. Stop going along
to get along. Start acting like the independent and co-equal branch of
government you’re supposed to be.
But there is yet another Constitutional player whose pulse must be taken
and whose role must be examined in order to understand the dangerous
imbalance that has emerged with the efforts by the Executive Branch to
dominate our constitutional system.
We the people are – collectively – still the key to the survival of
America’s democracy. We – as Lincoln put it, “[e]ven we here” – must examine
our own role as citizens in allowing and not preventing the shocking
decay and degradation of our democracy.
Thomas Jefferson said: “An informed citizenry is the only true
repository of the public will.”
The revolutionary departure on which the idea of America was based was
the audacious belief that people can govern themselves and responsibly
exercise the ultimate authority in self-government. This insight
proceeded inevitably from the bedrock principle articulated by the
Enlightenment philosopher John Locke: “All just power is derived from
the consent of the governed.”
The intricate and carefully balanced constitutional system that is now
in such danger was created with the full and widespread participation of
the population as a whole. The Federalist Papers were, back in the day,
widely-read newspaper essays, and they represented only one of
twenty-four series of essays that crowded the vibrant marketplace of
ideas in which farmers and shopkeepers recapitulated the debates that
played out so fruitfully in Philadelphia.
Indeed, when the Convention had done its best, it was the people – in
their various States – that refused to confirm the result until, at
their insistence, the Bill of Rights was made integral to the document
sent forward for ratification.
And it is “We the people” who must now find once again the ability
we
once had to play an integral role in saving our Constitution.
And here there is cause for both concern and great hope. The age of
printed pamphlets and political essays has long since been replaced by
television – a distracting and absorbing medium which sees determined to
entertain and sell more than it informs and educates.
Lincoln’s memorable call during the Civil War is applicable in a new way
to our dilemma today: “We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall
save our country.”
Forty years have passed since the majority of Americans adopted
television as their principal source of information. Its dominance has
become so extensive that virtually all significant political
communication now takes place within the confines of flickering
30-second television advertisements.
And the political economy supported by these short but expensive
television ads is as different from the vibrant politics of America’s
first century as those politics were different from the feudalism which
thrived on the ignorance of the masses of people in the Dark Ages.
The constricted role of ideas in the American political system today has
encouraged efforts by the Executive Branch to control the flow of
information as a means of controlling the outcome of important decisions
that still lie in the hands of the people.
The Administration vigorously asserts its power to maintain the secrecy
of its operations. After all, the other branches can’t check an abuse of
power if they don’t know it is happening.
For example, when the Administration was attempting to persuade Congress
to enact the Medicare prescription drug benefit, many in the House and
Senate raised concerns about the cost and design of the program. But,
rather than engaging in open debate on the basis of factual data, the
Administration withheld facts and prevented the Congress from hearing
testimony that it sought from the principal administration expert who
had compiled information showing in advance of the vote that indeed the
true cost estimates were far higher than the numbers given to Congress
by the President.
Deprived of that information, and believing the false numbers given to
it instead, the Congress approved the program. Tragically, the entire
initiative is now collapsing – all over the country – with the
Administration making an appeal just this weekend to major insurance
companies to volunteer to bail it out.
To take another example, scientific warnings about the catastrophic
consequences of unchecked global warming were censored by a political
appointee in the White House who had no scientific training. And today
one of the leading scientific experts on global warming in NASA has been
ordered not to talk to members of the press and to keep a careful log of
everyone he meets with so that the Executive Branch can monitor and
control his discussions of global warming.
One of the other ways the Administration has tried to control the flow
of information is by consistently resorting to the language and politics
of fear in order to short-circuit the debate and drive its agenda
forward without regard to the evidence or the public interest. As
President Eisenhower said, “Any who act as if freedom’s defenses are to
be found in suppression and suspicion and fear confess a doctrine that
is alien to America.”
Fear drives out reason. Fear suppresses the politics of discourse and
opens the door to the politics of destruction. Justice Brandeis once
wrote: “Men feared witches and burnt women.”
The founders of our country faced dire threats. If they failed in their
endeavors, they would have been hung as traitors. The very existence of
our country was at risk.
Yet, in the teeth of those dangers, they insisted on establishing the
Bill of Rights.
Is our Congress today in more danger than were their predecessors when
the British army was marching on the Capitol? Is the world more
dangerous than when we faced an ideological enemy with tens of thousands
of missiles poised to be launched against us and annihilate our country
at a moment’s notice? Is America in more danger now than when we faced
worldwide fascism on the march – when our fathers fought and won two World
Wars simultaneously?
It is simply an insult to those who came before us and sacrificed so
much on our behalf to imply that we have more to be fearful of than
they. Yet they faithfully protected our freedoms and now it is up to us
to do the same.
We have a duty as Americans to defend our citizens’ right not only to
life but also to liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is therefore
vital in our current circumstances that immediate steps be taken to
safeguard our Constitution against the present danger posed by the
intrusive overreaching on the part of the Executive Branch and the
President’s apparent belief that he need not live under the rule of law.
I endorse the words of Bob Barr, when he said, “The President has dared
the American people to do something about it. For the sake of the
Constitution, I hope they will.”
A special counsel should immediately be appointed by the Attorney
General to remedy the obvious conflict of interest that prevents him
from investigating what many believe are serious violations of law by
the President. We have had a fresh demonstration of how an independent
investigation by a special counsel with integrity can rebuild confidence
in our system of justice. Patrick Fitzgerald has, by all accounts, shown
neither fear nor favor in pursuing allegations that the Executive Branch
has violated other laws.
Republican as well as Democratic members of Congress should support the
bipartisan call of the Liberty Coalition for the appointment of a
special counsel to pursue the criminal issues raised by warrantless
wiretapping of Americans by the President.
Second, new whistleblower protections should immediately be established
for members of the Executive Branch who report evidence of wrongdoing –
especially where it involves the abuse of Executive Branch authority in
the sensitive areas of national security.
Third, both Houses of Congress should hold comprehensive – and not just
superficial – hearings into these serious allegations of criminal behavior
on the part of the President. And, they should follow the evidence
wherever it leads.
Fourth, the extensive new powers requested by the Executive Branch in
its proposal to extend and enlarge the Patriot Act should, under no
circumstances be granted, unless and until there are adequate and
enforceable safeguards to protect the Constitution and the rights of the
American people against the kinds of abuses that have so recently been
revealed.
Fifth, any telecommunications company that has provided the government
with access to private information concerning the communications of
Americans without a proper warrant should immediately cease and desist
their complicity in this apparently illegal invasion of the privacy of
American citizens.
Freedom of communication is an essential prerequisite for the
restoration of the health of our democracy.
It is particularly important that the freedom of the Internet be
protected against either the encroachment of government or the efforts
at control by large media conglomerates. The future of our democracy
depends on it.
I mentioned that along with cause for concern, there is reason for hope.
As I stand here today, I am filled with optimism that America is on the
eve of a golden age in which the vitality of our democracy will be
re-established and will flourish more vibrantly than ever. Indeed I can
feel it in this hall.
As Dr. King once said, “Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it
is, let us trace its movements and pray that our own inner being may be
sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond
the darkness that seems so close around us.”