Al Gore says it better than I ever could. Please take the time to read
this rather lengthy speach.
http://rawstory.com/news/2005/Text_of_Gore_speech_0116.html
or
http://tinyurl.com/8hxjv
<<
There have of course been other periods in American history when the
Executive Branch claimed new powers 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.
And when his successor, President Thomas Jefferson, eliminated the abuses,
in his first inaugural 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 regain the road which alone leads to peace, liberty
and safety."
President Lincoln, of course, 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 shameful low point for the respect of individual rights at
the hands of the executive. And, of course, during the Vietnam War, the
notorious COINTELPRO program was part and parcel of those abuses
experienced by Dr. King and so many thousands of others.
But in each of these cases throughout American history, when the conflict
and turmoil subsided, our nation recovered its equilibrium and absorbed
the lessons learned in a recurring cycle of excess and regret.
But, 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 globe where there are 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. But, as Justice
Frankfurter wrote in that famous 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 that believe we may be experiencing something new --
outside that historical cycle -- is that we are, after all, told by this
Administration that the war footing upon which he has tried to place the
country is going to "last” in their phrase, “for the rest of our lives."
And so, we are told that the conditions of national threat that have been
used by other Presidents to justify arrogations of power will, in this
case, persist in near perpetuity.
Third, we need to be keenly aware of the startling advances in the
sophistication of eavesdropping and surveillance technologies with their
capacity to easily sweep up and analyze enormous quantities of information
and then mine it for intelligence. And 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 grows. Those
technologies do have the potential for shifting the balance of power
between the apparatus of the state and the freedom of the individual in
ways that are both subtle and profound.
Don't misunderstand me: the threat of additional terror strikes is real
and the concerted efforts by terrorists to acquire weapons of mass
destruction does indeed create a real imperative to exercise the powers of
the Executive Branch with swiftness and agility. Moreover, there is in
fact an inherent power conferred by the Constitution to the any President
to take unilateral action when necessary to protect the nation from a
sudden and immediate threat. And 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 many years and
producing a serious imbalance in the relationship between the executive
and the other two branches of government.
And there is a final reason to worry that we may be experiencing something
more than just another cycle. This Administration has come to power in the
thrall of a legal theory that aims to convince us that this excessive
concentration of presidential power is exactly what our Constitution
intended.
This legal theory, which its proponents call the theory of the unitary
executive but which ought to be 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, cannot be checked by Congress. And
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, both domestic
and foreign. And 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 subservient 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 a form of dominance in the world.
And the common denominator seems to be based on an instinct to intimidate
and control.
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