Our Constitutional Crisis and the Importance of this November’s Elections

[Time for change]

The central issue in this November’s elections is the abject failure of our Republican Congress to deal with a Constitutional crisis which could result in the destruction of our nation as we know it. John Conyers’ great report, “The Constitution in Crisis – The Downing Street Minutes and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution, Cover-ups in the Iraq War, and Illegal Domestic Surveillance”, says it all. The Constitutional crisis that we now find ourselves in is fundamentally different – and worse – than anything our country has faced since the Civil War.

The cause of this crisis is manifold, but there are two salient causes that are pertinent to this November’s elections: First, we have a presidential administration that, in addition to numerous other faults, has no respect for our Constitution, international law, or the rule of law in general. Indeed, they believe that no law applies to them. But more important with regard to the coming elections, we have a rubber stamp Republican Congress that, in addition to its numerous other faults, has passively complied with whatever the Bush administration wants to do. In short, we have a Congress that has forfeited their responsibility, as outlined in our Constitution, to balance the power of the Executive Branch of government – and which therefore has been complicit in the piece by piece dismantling of our Constitution. And needless to say, without a Constitution we have no nation as we know it. That is the major point that we should drive home to Republicans and Independents and anyone who might not vote for Democratic Congresspersons in this election.

Democrats can and should talk about other issues as well, including our many cherished ideals that set us apart from Republicans, and including the numerous recent scandals that have provided valuable insight into the true character of today’s Republican Party.

The Tom Foley pedophilia sex scandal is symptomatic of the “win at all costs” attitude of the Republican leadership. The Jack Abramoff scandal is indicative of a culture of rampant corruption which, for many Republicans has come to represent their routine manner of conducting business. The Bush administration’s allowing North Korea to become a nuclear power and then trying to blame that on a President who hasn’t been in power for the six years during which that country has advanced its nuclear program is emblematic of a presidential administration which is incompetent and dishonest to its core, and it also says a great deal about the character of a Congress which gives that administration its full and fawning support.

But beyond all of that, this election is about something much more important. It is about the survival of our country as we know it. The many crimes of the Bush administration against the people and the Constitution of the United States, and our resulting Constitutional crisis, are meticulously detailed in the Conyers report, which contains 1,401 references to back up its assertions. For those Republicans or others who might believe that Congressman Conyers is too partisan to be taken seriously on this issue, I challenge them to find any substantive inaccuracies in his report.

And no one should think for a minute that we have begun to feel the full effects of what will happen to our country if the Bush administration is allowed to continue unimpeded for much longer. Most tyrannies hold back on their worst abuses until they consolidate their power. And then it’s too late. Just think about the U.S.S.R. under Stalin, Germany under Hitler, or the conversion of the Roman republic to the Roman Empire.

We should vigorously urge Republicans and undecided voters to read Conyers’ report, while reminding them of the critical role that our current Republican Congress has played in the Constitutional crisis that Conyers speaks of. But for those who don’t want to spend the time, here is a summary of the salient issues:


The Iraq War

Conyers’ report proves that the decision by George Bush and his administration to go to war against Iraq had nothing to do with connections between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda, nor with involvement by Saddam Hussein in the September 11 attacks on our country, nor with the stockpiling of weapons of mass destruction or even the beginnings of a nuclear weapons program. None of those things existed at the time we went to war against Iraq. And not only that, but George Bush and his administration knew that none of those things existed. As the Downing Street memos show, the Bush administration used intelligence not to assess the need for war, but rather that intelligence was fixed around the need to justify an already predetermined decision to go to war. So all the while that George Bush was claiming that he was trying to give diplomacy a chance, the decision had already been made. And furthermore, plans to go to war against Iraq were already on the table in the first month after George Bush took office in 2000, and on the very day of the September 11th attacks those plans began to accelerate, even though there was no evidence whatsoever that Iraq was involved in the attacks.

In other words, the whole case for war in Iraq was a fraud. Assertions of a biological weapons program in Iraq were based largely on the claims of a witness (“Curveball”) who was widely considered by experts to be unreliable. Assertions that Iraq was trying to acquire uranium from Africa were based largely on a forgery which should have been readily apparent. Assertions that Iraq intended to use aluminum tubes to produce nuclear material were vigorously disputed by experts in the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). To support its case for war, the Bush administration even used confessions obtained through torture, which intelligence experts in the administration claimed were entirely unreliable because the confessions obviously resulted simply from the desire of the victim to stop the torture. As explained in detail by Seymour Hersh, the Bush administration consistently pressured the CIA to “produce” intelligence that supported its case for war, often against great resistance.

Of course, after we failed to find any evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq the Bush administration changed its propaganda to claim that we were now fighting for Democracy for the Iraqi people. For those who believe that, consider the facts that hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians have died in this war, that polls of the Iraqi people show that they want us out, and that the first thing the Bush administration ordered upon taking control of the country was protection of the oil supplies, to the exclusion of everything else while Iraq was dissolving into chaos.

And most important, our Republican rubber stamp Congress has not seen fit to investigate or even complain about these catastrophic abuses of power.


Abuse and torture of prisoners and loss of civil liberties

Though George Bush has claimed that his administration does not use torture, that is clearly a lie. An abundance of evidence by human rights organizations and others clearly demonstrates that the abuse and torture of prisoners has been routine with the Bush administration. George Bush himself has defended the right of his administration to utilize torture (using euphemisms of course). He has produced memos justifying the use of torture. High commanders in the U.S. military have routinely encouraged it. And after Congress passed a ban on torture earlier this year, Bush produced a signing statement saying that he would not honor that ban. And furthermore, reports from human rights organizations such as the International Red Cross, and even our own military, have shown that the good majority of suspects who undergo these abuses and who are held in our prisons indefinitely and without charges and kept incommunicado from their families, are innocent of any wrong doing.

And worst of all, our Republican rubber stamp Congress has acquiesced (with only one Republican voting against) to the Bush administration’s demands, with their shameful recent passage of the Military Commissions Act, which gives George Bush himself the right to define torture. Aside from the fact that the torture provisions in this bill are morally shameful, disgrace the United States in the eyes of the world, obliterate fundamental rights provided in the U.S. Constitution and the Geneva Conventions, and put U.S. prisoners at grave risk of being tortured when captured, they have been shown not to work. The Act also eats away at our Constitution in other ways, for example by denying the habeas corpus right to dispute imprisonment by our government, by defining “enemy combatant” so broadly that we could be tossed in jail for merely criticizing our government, and by allowing secret military commissions to rule on cases of suspected terrorists.


Retribution by the Bush administration against those who disagree with it

The Conyers report goes into great detail about how the Bush administration has routinely sought retribution against those who disagree with it. The best known of these instances is the outing of Valerie Plame as a CIA agent as a reprisal against her husband, Joseph Wilson, for attempting to publicly rebut the phony Bush claim that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had attempted to obtain uranium from Africa. But there are many more similar instances which are less well known.

General Eric Shinseki, former U.S. Army General Chief of Staff, was ignored and shunted into the background for vigorously trying to convince Donald Rumsfeld that he was not committing enough troops to the Iraq war to successfully accomplish our objectives. Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill was the victim of a Bush administration investigation because he made public the Bush administration’s plans to go to war against Iraq prior to the September 11th attacks. White House senior economic advisor Larry Lindsey was pushed out of office for accurately predicting the cost of the Iraq war. Richard Clarke, former Chief of counterterrorism in the Bush administration, was the victim of a Bush administration smear campaign after making public the many failures of the Bush administration’s non-attempt to prevent the September 11th attacks against us. Cindy Sheehan, whose son died in Iraq, was smeared by the Bush administration for protesting the Iraq war. Reporter Jeffrey Kofman was “outed” as a homosexual (see paragraph 4) by the Bush administration for publishing a report about the low morale of our soldiers in Iraq. Diplomat Jose Bustani was attacked and then fired (see paragraph 5) by the Bush administration for attempting to get weapons inspectors back into Iraq, which the Bush administration saw as an attempt to prevent war. And Bunnatine Greenhouse, former chief contracting officer for the Army Corps of Engineers, was demoted by the Bush administration for testifying to Congress about favoritism shown to Halliburton regarding Pentagon contracts.

And again, there was no reaction against or investigation into any of this by our Republican rubber stamp Congress.


Illegal domestic surveillance against Americans

Although George Bush has repeatedly assured American citizens and Congress that his warrantless domestic spying program is “legal” and directed at catching terrorists rather than spying on his domestic opponents, he has made no efforts to offer evidence for either of those assertions. Furthermore, knowledgeable sources have maintained that, though thousands of warantless wiretaps per year have been ordered and conducted by the Bush administration, fewer than ten per year are justified by the constitutional standard of “reasonable cause” for suspicion.

This program clearly violates both the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978 and the Fourth Amendment provisions of the United States Constitution against unreasonable searches and seizures. George Bush says that he must conduct this spying program without obtaining warrants because action needs to be swift in order to catch terrorists. But the FISA law allows warrants to be retroactive, so how can time be a factor?

Bush says that Democrats in Congress are against this program because they don’t think that it is important for his administration to listen in on the conversations of terrorists. That is a bald faced lie, and he knows it. No Congressional Democrat ever said or implied that. The FISA law does not in any way prevent the Bush administration from listening to conversations that are suspected of involving terrorists. What Congressional Democrats want is for our Constitution, which protects American citizens against abuses of government power, to be respected. Complying with the law will not prevent George Bush’s administration from listening to the conversations of terrorists. It will at least partially prevent them from spying on their domestic political opponents.


The bottom line

Congressional Democrats have repeatedly requested information from the Bush administration about its lying us into war, its torture policies, and its many other abuses of power and our Constitution. All their requests have been met with silence. And most important, the Republicans who control Congress have refused to do anything about this. But you can be sure that a Democratic Congress will investigate these abuses.

That is the central issue in this November’s elections. The Bush administration has prepared the ground for dictatorship through its gradual but progressive destruction of our Constitution. If it gets another two years to continue the job, under cover of another Republican Congress, it is very likely to be permanent.

On what basis do I say that? In addition to all the other abuses of power, a recent history of widespread election fraud and voter suppression in our country and the fact that we are increasingly utilizing electronic voting machines, produced by Republican allied corporations, that can be programmed to switch votes without leaving a trace, does not bode well for our future. Our Republican Congress continues to work towards the passage of laws that will entrench this system into our elections for the foreseeable future. If they get another two years I fear that they will be successful in that effort.

We have all heard many times the complaint that Democrats don’t have their own ideas. That is nonsense and simply a consequence of the Republican attack machine. The Democrats have a multitude of ideas, but our corporate news media usually doesn’t see fit to talk about them. If the only ideas they had were raising the minimum wage, providing adequate health insurance for Americans and investigating the abuses of power of the Bush administration, that would be more than enough to justify their election. I have included a more comprehensive summary of Democratic ideas in this post.

In conclusion, if you believe that our country no longer needs it’s Constitution, including its Bill of Rights, which protects our liberties, then you will no doubt vote Republican this November. If you believe that George Bush’s “War on Terror” justifies or requires permanent suspension of our Constitution, of the rule of law in our country and of the sentiments expressed in our Declaration of Independence, then you will no doubt vote Republican. But you should keep in mind that our Founding Fathers did not write our Constitution to be a suicide pact. Our Constitution was designed to protect us against foreign threats, while simultaneously protecting us against abuses of power by our own government as well. We are well on our way to losing those protections. But if you think that that’s ok because you or your children or your grandchildren do not and will never need protection against our own government, then I refer you to Benjamin Franklin’s famous quote: "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

We have been gifted with a remarkable Constitution, which has served to guide us in the progress of democracy for over two centuries. But as Eleanor Roosevelt said, “The basis of success in a Democracy is really laid down by the people. It will progress only as their own personal development goes forward.” If the American people vote this November to continue down our path to destruction, that will signal that their ‘personal development’ is no longer consistent with the maintenance of a democratic nation.


P.S. – Conyers gives credit to the blogosphere for his report

Congressman Conyers says at the end of the introduction to his report:

I would like to give credit to the “blogosphere” for its myriad and invaluable contributions to me and my staff. Absent the assistance of “blogs” and other internet based media, it would have been impossible to assemble all the information, sources and other materials necessary to the preparation of this report. Whereas the so-called “mainstream media” has frequently been willing to look past the abuses of the Bush administration, the blogosphere has proven to be a new and important bulwark of our Nation’s first amendment freedoms.