A public service message

Al Gore delivered a dynamic speech this past Monday night at Constitution Hall in Washington, DC. If you have not yet seen, heard or read it, please have a look at it (links below). Or, at the very least, please continue reading this post. I offer you small bits and pieces from the speech (the italics) and my own summary and comments. Gore’s message was powerful and absolutely essential for all Americans, or at least those of us who value our liberty. It was inspiring to hear a mainstream politician voice some of the concerns that many of us have been expressing for a rather long time already.

In his opening line, Gore defined a principal problem:

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.

Gore argued for restoration of the rule of law, and asserted that a president should never be beyond the rule of law. He shared the thoughts of our Founding Fathers:

“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.” – John Adams

“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.” – James Madison

But G.W. Bush has assumed powers that do not belong in the hands of the president. Amongst the examples which Gore offered were the suspension of habeas corpus and the practices of torture and rendition.

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.

For those of you, like Max's brother, who still think that Bush’s tiny little baby steps towards fascism do not amount to anything, here is a bit of analysis from Harold Koh, the Dean of Yale Law School:

“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.”

Or perhaps you will prefer the words of Justice Frankfurter, as written 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.”

Gore described the theory of the unitary, or unilateral, executive:

This legal theory 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.

We have a problem with dishonesty. As an example, Gore used Cheney’s claim of the week before, that had the Administration had its eavesdropping programme in place prior to 9/11, they would have learned the names of some of the hijackers. But the facts are entirely different:

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.

Gore went on diplomatically to blame incompetence for the mishandling of that information. But in this instance, I prefer the conclusions of Gore Vidal, who has compared 9/11 with Pearl Harbour - both were real attacks, but neither was in any way a surprise.

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.

Gore accused the judicial and legislative branches of our government of not exercising their muscles in our system of checks and balances. He pointed out that there are justices on the Supreme Court that believe in a powerful executive, most notably Bush’s appointee, Chief Justice Roberts and his current nominee, Judge Alito. Congress kowtows to the president, and its members are too busy raising money to engage in meaningful debate of the issues. There is corruption. Both Democrats and Republicans are to blame.

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.

And Gore then blamed We the people, and shared another couple of quotes:

“An informed citizenry is the only true repository of the public will.” – Thomas Jefferson

“All just power is derived from the consent of the governed.” – John Locke (Enlightenment philosopher)

We the people have become stupid and uninformed because, according to Gore, for the past 40 years, the majority of Americans have got their news primarily from television. We have dumbed ourselves right out of government by the people. We do not know what is going on so we believe what we are told. One of the ways the Bush administration has tried to influence what we hear and what we think is through the culture of fear that they have created.

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.”

In his conclusion, Gore stated that the founders of our country faced greater threats than we do today, and yet they came up with the Bill of Rights – guaranteeing freedoms rather than restricting them. And finally, he outlined the steps he feels we should take to begin turning things back round towards the rule of law, and liberty.

And Gore’s delivery was actually dynamic, believe it or not, at least in the excerpts that I saw.

You can find that clip of excerpts at www.crooksandliars.com, and the full text of the speech at http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11584.htm.