Copy and paste and mail to all your friends.
Thanks to Nothing Without Hope for collecting the links!
_______________________________
Dear Friends,
Yesterday Al Gore spoke out in the clearest, strongest
language about the Constitutional crisis we face if George
Bush continues to flout the rule of law. This was the most
important, inspiring speech I have ever heard. I hope you all
saw it. If not I have enclosed links to video, audio, and a
transcript.
~Stef
_______________________________
If you missed Al Gore's speech at Constitution Hall yesterday,
watch it here:
Video >
CSPAN link to streaming video of the entire speech in Real
Media format (1 hr 7 min)
rtsp://video.c-span.org/project/ter/ter011606_gore.rm
_______________________________
If you can't watch, listen to it here:
MP3 >
http://www.canofun.com/blog/videos/2006/gorebushspypostjan1606.mp3
Also here >
http://news.globalfreepress.com/mp3/gore/2006/01/16/Gore_Constitutional_Crisis-01-16-06.96.mp3
_______________________________
If you can't listen, please read it:
http://www.algore.org/
Transcript: Al Gore On the Limits of Executive Power
Monday, 16 January 2006
by Al Gore
Remarks as prepared
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."
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