If You Think Our Long National Nightmare Will End in '08, Think Again

Glad as I will be to see the worst president in American history take up brush clearing full-time, I don't for a second imagine that the nightmare into which he has sunk America will end when he does so.

If every illegal power he assumed for the executive branch persists, if his rank criminal behavior goes unpunished, the course of the country will still track as inexorably toward something ugly and fundamentally un-American.

None of the leading democrats recognize that we are at a tipping point in the history of the country. Past that point is ever more authoritarian government, cloaked in the increasingly substance-less forms of 'democracy.' The natural culmination of this process is a nation of flag-worshippers, focused on the now-empty symbols of democracy, deprived of the rights and freedoms that give them meaning.

If you think that merely electing a democrat will reverse this course, think again:

"If elected president in 2008, Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton would consider giving up some of the executive powers President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have assumed since taking office."

Apparently, she has considered it, and, in the case of signing statements at least, has decided against it:

"Democrat Hillary Clinton says 'in very rare instances,' she might attach a so-called signing statement to a bill reserving a right to bypass ‘provisions that contradict the Constitution.'"

Obama, Clinton and Edwards all embrace the idea that the executive may unilaterally determine constitutionality, and use signing statements to rewrite law already passed by the legislature. They insist, naturally, that their use of signing statements will be judicious, well-founded, etc., in short, that such power will never tempt them to abuse.

And while they now condemn Bush’s use of other powers he has assumed, who would care to wager that, once in office, they will not ‘discover’ that even these powers, when used properly, can be potent tools of freedom and democracy, and that it would be rash, even irresponsible, to abandon them?

A president possessed of tyrannical powers who, for whatever reason, doesn’t use them, or uses them with restraint, is as potent a threat to the Republic as Bush. The preservation and transmission of these powers imbues them with the authority of precedent. When they finally and inevitably come into the hands of one who will use them without restraint, how will they be stopped?

There is one way and one way only to wake up from the nightmare: Impeachment. It doesn't matter, as John Conyers insists, that "the votes aren't there." Impeachment isn't pointless unless successful. To seriously undertake the process is to say "we draw the line here" in a way that establishes a precedent future executives can't ignore.

John Nichols has summed up the situation better than I can:

"On January 20th, 2009, if George Bush and Dick Cheney are not appropriately held to account this administration will hand off a toolbox with more powers than any president has ever had, more powers than the founders could have imagined. And that box may be handed to Hillary Clinton or it may be handed to Mitt Romney or Barack Obama or someone else. But whoever gets it, one of the things we know about power is that people don't give away the tools. They don't give them up. The only way we take tools out of that box is if we sanction George Bush and Dick Cheney now and say the next president cannot govern as these men have."

Limitless executive detention, rendition, torture, warrantless eavesdropping on Americans, destruction of evidence, withholding of evidence and obstruction of justice with sweeping claims of executive privilege, ignoring the law at will. These are some of the behaviors and powers we are set to legitimize and make permanently within the scope of acceptable executive authority, by handing them intact to the next executive. John Nichols again:

". . . we are defining what the presidency will be in the future today because we do know the high crimes and misdemeanors of George Bush and Dick Cheney. They have been well illustrated even by a-- rather lax media. They have been discussed in Congress.

If we know these things and we do not hold them to account, then we are saying, as a people and as a Congress, we are saying that we can find out that you have violated the rule of law. We can find out that you have disregarded the Constitution. . . . we can find out that you've done harm to the republic. But there will still be no penalty for that. If that's the standard that we've set, it will hold. It will not be erased in the future."

Impeachment is not about punishment now, its about course correction.