King George's America

The Boston Globe has another excellent article on the continuing imperial power grabs of the Bush administration-

The office of Vice President Dick Cheney routinely reviews pieces of legislation before they reach the president's desk, searching for provisions that Cheney believes would infringe on presidential power, according to former White House and Justice Department officials.

The officials said Cheney's legal adviser and chief of staff, David Addington , is the Bush administration's leading architect of the "signing statements" the president has appended to more than 750 laws. The statements assert the president's right to ignore the laws because they conflict with his interpretation of the Constitution...

...Previous vice presidents have had neither the authority nor the interest in reviewing legislation. But Cheney has used his power over the administration's legal team to promote an expansive theory of presidential authority. Using signing statements, the administration has challenged more laws than all previous administrations combined...

This comes on the heels of their key report of the administration (ab)use of presidential signing statements to circumvent the law. Laws that the President has blown off with these statements include "a ban on torture, oversight provisions in the USA Patriot Act, and numerous requirements that they provide certain information to Congress", and hundreds of other laws. Frightening stuff for any self-respecting American.

Other examples of this power-grab (stories I've come across literally just this weekend alone) include: The White House citing security reasons for asking federal judges to dismiss lawsuits directed at the NSA's domestic spying program, a report that Attorney General Gonzales and the FBI Director are pressuring "telecommunications officials to record their customers' Internet activities" and retain the information, the White House 'interviewing' members of Congress to try and find leakers, and Vice President Cheney's continuing refusal to comply with an executive order requiring him to disclose his classification and declassification activities. That's four stories this weekend alone. A bit of Googling would likely find me more.

Will the Republican Congress ever push back against this or even ask some hard questions about what the White House is doing? Don't count on it. For me, that's the top reason to elect a Democratic Congress this Fall... accountability. There are many other reasons too- adult fiscal management, less subservience to religious fundamentalists, saner foreign policy pronouncements, responsible leadership- but that's the big reason. Checks and balances need to come back in style.

The media, of course, is as a whole mostly uninterested in these pesky constitutional matters.

In dealing with the fact that far too many Americans seem to find no problem with this radical reinvention of Executive power, Glenn Greenwald explains how in the post-9/11 world, people seem to have forgotten how America is supposed to work. Key sections-

As one can say for so many core American political principles, the U.S. Government under 42 different Presidents has thrived and defended the nation for 220 years without the need to imprison journalists for the stories they publish, but the Bush administration is the first to claim that it has to dismantle these liberties because it is too weak -- and America is too weak -- to maintain national security unless we radically change the kind of country we are...

...That's how this group of Bush followers thinks America is supposed to work. If you are a U.S. citizen, the President can unilaterally order you abducted and imprisoned; does not have to charge you with any crime; can block you from speaking with anyone, including a lawyer; can keep you incarcerated indefinitely (meaning forever); and can deny you the right to any judicial review of your imprisonment or any mechanism for challenging the accuracy of the accusations. And oh - while it would be nice if we could preserve all of that abstract lawyer nonsense about the right to a jury trial and all that, we're really scared that Al Qaeda is going to kill us, so we can't...

Andrew Sullivan shares the sentiment, stating that "the glee with which some conservatives greet the expansion of unlimited government power is truly remarkable".

Where Greenwald is right is that these ideas are unamerican. Where he is wrong is his implication that this hasn't happened before. There have been previous abuses of American liberties with national security justifications- suspension of habeus corpus in the Civil War, the Alien and Sedition Acts, internment of Japanese Americans during WWII, etc. It should be noted that none of these abuses helped us in our fights. Rather they made them more difficult and remain a stain on our great history. I imagine the history books will share that same opinion on these past few years. Of course, in fairness, those were isolated abuses put in place by otherwise well-meaning Presidents... what we are seeing now represents an unprecedented, calculated effort to use Americans' genuine security concerns to increase presidential power permanently.

I am not sure how to combat this post-9/11 national mindset, short of a trusted political leader coming along and giving America a symbolic pinch and telling them that it's time to wake up from this nightmare.

Surely there must be a politician that can get Americans to understand that dealing with terrorism doesn't warrant surrending our basic American values and issuing unlimited power to a President, particularly one with such a disastrous record on every issue of consquence. True, there have been some- like Russ Feingold among others- but their messages have been suffocated by the same right-wing people that Greenwald and Sullivan are writing about. But there must be some way to get the message over the right-wing noise machine. Ultimately, though, the problem is that these aren't issues that most Americans bother to care about. Bills to pay, TV shows to watch, etc... I see this even when I discuss these issues with my moderately liberal friends. It's a mix of people being detached from the abuses and therefore not understanding the significance, being too busy with day-to-day life to care, and the cynical belief that this is just business as usual for the U.S. government.

I do not foresee a major shift in public concern for any of this.

Pachacutec at Firedoglake summarizes how the administration has converted so many to their beliefs on Executive power-

Bushco has enslaved Americans into a psychological reign of "War on Terror" that amounts to a criminal protection racket. We are told we must be afraid. That is, we are told we must live in terror. This is to protect us from. . . terror. Then, because we feel terrified, we must give up our freedom - freedom to write what we believe without fear of reprisal, freedom of due process and habeas corpus protection, freedom from secret intrusion into our private lives by government.

Yup.

We've become what the exact goal of terrorism is... afraid, irrational, and self-destructive. President Bush says we are winning the war. Perhaps he means that he is winning, in however he defines his personal political goals. As for the rest of us, our salvation may not come until 2009, assuming the next President doesn't simply continue where George left off.

Finally, some bloggers look at "Top 10 Signs of the Impending U.S. Police State".