madison2.jpgIn the cause of liberty, we must be ever vigilant.  Via the NYTimes opinion page:

Many critics of the Iraq war are reluctant to suggest that President Bush went into it in anything but good faith. But James Madison, widely known as the father of the Constitution, might have been more skeptical. “In war, the honors and emoluments of office are to be multiplied; and it is the executive patronage under which they are to be enjoyed,” he warned. “It is in war, finally, that laurels are to be gathered; and it is the executive brow they are to encircle.”

When they drafted the Constitution, Madison and his colleagues wrote their skepticism into the text. In Britain, the king had the authority to declare war, and raise and support armies, among other war powers. The framers expressly rejected this model and gave these powers not to the president, but to Congress.

The radical nature of the Republican party must be understood in full context in order to comprehend the broad scope of their grab at power — and their wholesale rejection of the principles on which this nation was founded, in favor of whatever means is necessary to consolidate their hold on power, whatever the cost to the rest of the nation as a whole.  Rick Perlstein’s seminal work on the Goldwater political insurgency is a great place to start in understanding this.

But it goes further than Goldwater — the Bush/Cheney Administration’s disrespect for the institutions of government as independent actors is palpable, just as their need to consolidate power and control is both obvious and necessary to the implementation of their unilateral executive goals.  As Bruce Fein recently said during the Bill Moyers’ special regarding the extent of the Bush Administration’s disrespect for the rule of law and our nation’s Constitution:

…he [Bush] is seeking more institutionally to cripple checks and balances and the authority of Congress and the judiciary to superintend his assertions of power. He has claimed the authority to tell Congress they don’t have any right to know what he’s doing with relation to spying on American citizens, using that information in any way that he wants in contradiction to a federal statute called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. He’s claimed authority to say he can kidnap people, throw them into dungeons abroad, dump them out into Siberia without any political or legal accountability. These are standards that are totally anathema to a democratic society devoted to the rule of law.

This speaks volumes all by itself.  The fact is that these actions are an outgrowth of a wholesale attempt to shift the foundations of government toward an imperial control by the privileged few, rather than a republic in which the laws and the people themselves are king.

This is a government wherein a unilateral executive makes all decisions in a dictatorial fashion with some nods to the other branches for the sake of appearance, writ large across the broad spectrum of executive and administrative agencies.  As we have seen through the turmoil within the DOJ and the various Hatch Act violations investigations, along with the wholesale disregard of civil liberties through the mechanisms of fear and intimidation, these agencies have been converted as extentions of the political and power-gathering machinery of the current administration — to be used to those selfish political ends for those who would grab ever more power, and not for the good of the whole nation’s needs.

The lessons that Dick Cheney and George Bush took away from the Nixon Administration were not that overreach would get you in the end, or that adherence to the letter of the law was important.  No, what they learned was that if you are going to consolidate your grip on power, you had to do it wholesale and demand that you not be held accountable — it’s the Iran-Contra message replicated across the whole of government.  If you are going to break the law, then you have to first consolidate your control of the very means by which you might be caught and/or held responsible.

But this only works if we are willing to allow them to continue down this path without redress. 

As Jane said yesterday, the Bush Administration is counting on continuing to hold the Grand Obstruction Party and WINO votes that it currently has in the Senate in its back pocket by whatever means necessary to ensure that any accountability for their illegal and immoral actions will never see the light of day outside the continued Republican Senate filibuster and stall tactics.  So long as the Bush Administration holds these votes in their back pocket, there will never be full accountability for any of their misdeeds.

What Harry Reid was able to do last week was begin to wedge a few “sure thing” support votes away from the Bush Administration through the time-tested means of public pressure and political threat of electoral reprisal next year.  Which is exactly why the likes of Fred Hiatt and David Brooks are so very afraid, because suddenly the punditocracy has been proven so very, very wrong.  “We, the people” have a say in our nation’s governance — do not ever let them tell you differently — and we have a duty to stand in the face of injustice.

Republicans are running as far and as fast as they can from the Bush Administration when they are back home in their districts.  But back in DC, they are keeping up appearances and trying to be the docile rubber stamps that we have come to know and loathe, in order not to rile the financial backers that are still under Rove’s pudgy thumb.  What hangs in the balance is the fate of the nation — and it is time that we all started to tip the scales.  And I’d like to talk about some ways that we can do just that…

(Photo of a statue of James Madison standing before John Trumbull’s famous depiction of the siging of the Declaration of Independence in the US Capitol rotunda via Brent and Marilynn.)

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  4. More on Holder’s “New” State Secrets Policy
  5. Restoring the Rule of Law: Absence of Action is a Policy Choice, Too