Al Gore: 'America's Constitution is in Grave Danger'

[dirkie]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

Een stelling die ook aan de 'democratische' afluister
en andere maatregelen van de nederlandse overheden
voorgelegd zou kunnen worden. Zeker Nu...

"whenever power is unchecked and unaccountable it
almost inevitably leads to mistakes and abuses. In the
absence of rigorous accountability, incomp-etence
flourishes. Dishonesty is encouraged and rewarded."

en verderop...

As we begin this new year, the Executive Branch
of our government has been caught eavesdropping on
huge numbers of American citizens and has brazenly
declared that it has the unilateral right to continue
without regard to the established law enacted by
Congress to prevent such abuses.



--- Henk Elegeert <HmjE at Home.nl> wrote:

> REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl
>
> "
> Transcript from Truthout
>
> Al Gore: 'America's Constitution is in Grave Danger'
> http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/011606Y.shtml
>
> Former Vice President Albert Gore Jr. delivered a
> major policy speech
> today that assailed the President for abusing
> executive power. Gore
> argued that "whenever power is unchecked and
> unaccountable it almost
> inevitably leads to mistakes and abuses. In the
> absence of rigorous
> accountability, incompetence flourishes. Dishonesty
> is encouraged and
> rewarded."
> The former Vice President went on to say,
> "Republican as well as
> Democratic members of Congress should support the
> bipartisan call of the
> Liberty Coalition for the appointment of a special
> counsel to pursue the
> criminal issues raised by warrantless wiretapping of
> Americans by the
> President.
>
> US Constitution in Grave Danger
>      By Albert Gore Jr.
>      t r u t h o u t | Speech
>      Monday 16 January 2006
>
>    The following is the transcript as prepared for
> delivery.
>      Congressman Barr and I have disagreed many
> times over the years,
> but we have joined together today with thousands of
> our fellow
> citizens-Democrats and Republicans alike-to express
> our shared concern
> that America's Constitution is in grave danger.
>
>      In spite of our differences over ideology and
> politics, we are in
> strong agreement that the American values we hold
> most dear have been
> placed at serious risk by the unprecedented claims
> of the Administration
> to a truly breathtaking expansion of executive
> power.
>
>      As we begin this new year, the Executive Branch
> of our government
> has been caught eavesdropping on huge numbers of
> American citizens and
> has brazenly declared that it has the unilateral
> right to continue
> without regard to the established law enacted by
> Congress to prevent such
> abuses.
>
>      It is imperative that respect for the rule of
> law be restored.
>
>      So, many of us have come here to Constitution
> Hall to sound an
> alarm and call upon our fellow citizens to put aside
> partisan
> differences and join with us in demanding that our
> Constitution be
> defended and preserved.
>
>      It is appropriate that we make this appeal on
> the day our nation
> has set aside to honor the life and legacy of Dr.
> Martin Luther King,
> Jr., who challenged America to breathe new life into
> our oldest values
> by extending its promise to all our people.
>
>      On this particular Martin Luther King Day, it
> is especially
> important to recall that for the last several years
> of his life, Dr.
> King was illegally wiretapped-one of hundreds of
> thousands of Americans
> whose private communications were intercepted by the
> U.S. government
> during  this period.
>
>      The FBI privately called King the "most
> dangerous and effective
> negro leader in the country" and vowed to "take him
> off his pedestal."
> The  government even attempted to destroy his
> marriage and blackmail him
> into committing suicide.
>
>      This campaign continued until Dr. King's
> murder. The discovery that
> the FBI conducted a long-running and extensive
> campaign of secret
> electronic surveillance designed to infiltrate the
> inner workings of the
> Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and to
> learn the most intimate
> details of Dr. King's life, helped to convince
> Congress to enact
> restrictions on wiretapping.
>
>      The result was the Foreign Intelligence and
> Surveillance Act
> (FISA), which was enacted expressly to ensure that
> foreign intelligence
> surveillance would be presented to an impartial
> judge to verify that
> there is a sufficient cause for the surveillance. I
> voted for that law
> during  my first term in Congress and for almost
> thirty years the system
> has proven a workable and valued means of according
> a level of
> protection for private citizens, while permitting
> foreign surveillance
> to continue.
>
>      Yet, just one month ago, Americans awoke to the
> shocking news that
> in spite of this long settled law, the Executive
> Branch has been
> secretly spying on large numbers of Americans for
> the last four years
> and eavesdropping on "large volumes of telephone
> calls, e-mail messages,
> and  other Internet traffic inside the United
> States." The New York
> Times reported that the President decided to launch
> this massive
> eavesdropping program "without search warrants or
> any new laws that
> would permit such domestic intelligence collection."
>
>      During the period when this eavesdropping was
> still secret, the
> President went out of his way to reassure the
> American people on more
> than one occasion that, of course, judicial
> permission is required for
> any government spying on American citizens and that,
> of course, these
> constitutional safeguards were still in place.
>
>      But surprisingly, the President's soothing
> statements turned out to
> be false. Moreover, as soon as this massive domestic
> spying program was
> uncovered by the press, the President not only
> confirmed that the story
> was true, but also declared that he has no intention
> of bringing these
> wholesale invasions of privacy to an end.
>
>      At present, we still have much to learn about
> the NSA's domestic
> surveillance. What we do know about this pervasive
> wiretapping virtually
> compels the conclusion that the President of the
> United States has been
> breaking the law repeatedly and persistently.
>
>      A president who breaks the law is a threat to
> the very structure of
> our government. Our Founding Fathers were adamant
> that they had
> established a government of laws and not men.
> Indeed, they recognized
> that the structure of government they had enshrined
> in our Constitution
> - our system of checks and balances - was designed
> with a central
> purpose of ensuring that it would govern through the
> rule of law. As
> John Adams said: "The executive shall never exercise
> the legislative and
> judicial powers, or either of them, to the end that
> it may be a
> government of laws and not of men."
>
>      An executive who arrogates to himself the power
> to ignore the
> legitimate legislative directives of the Congress or
> to act free of the
> check of the judiciary becomes the central threat
> that the Founders
> sought to nullify in the Constitution - an
> all-powerful executive too
> reminiscent of the King from whom they had broken
> free. In the words of
> James Madison, "the accumulation of all powers,
> legislative, executive,
> and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a
> few, or many, and
> whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may
> justly be
> pronounced the very definition of tyranny."
>
>      Thomas Paine, whose pamphlet, "On Common Sense"
> ignited the
> American Revolution, succinctly described America's
> alternative. Here,
> he said, we intended to make certain that "the law
> is king."
>
>      Vigilant adherence to the rule of law
> strengthens our democracy and
> strengthens America. It ensures that those who
> govern us operate within
> our constitutional structure, which means that our
> democratic
> institutions play their indispensable role in
> shaping policy and
> determining the direction of our nation. It means
> that the people of
> this nation ultimately determine its course and not
> executive officials
> operating in  secret without constraint.
>
>      The rule of law makes us stronger by ensuring
> that decisions will
> be tested, studied, reviewed and examined through
> the processes of
> government that are designed to improve policy. And
> the knowledge that
> they will be reviewed prevents over-reaching and
> checks the accretion of
> power.
>
>      A commitment to openness, truthfulness and
> accountability also
> helps our country avoid many serious mistakes.
> Recently, for example, we
> learned from recently classified declassified
> documents that the Gulf of
> Tonkin Resolution, which authorized the tragic
> Vietnam war, was
> actually based on false information. We now know
> that the decision by
> Congress to authorize the Iraq War, 38 years later,
> was also based on
> false information. America would have been better
> off knowing the truth
> and avoiding both of these colossal mistakes in our
> history. Following
> the rule of law makes us safer, not more vulnerable.
>
>      The President and I agree on one thing. The
> threat from terrorism
> is all too real. There is simply no question that we
> continue to face
> new challenges in the wake of the attack on
> September 11th and that we
> must be ever-vigilant in protecting our citizens
> from harm.
>
>      Where we disagree is that we have to break the
> law or sacrifice our
> system of government to protect Americans from
> terrorism. In fact,
> doing so makes us weaker and more vulnerable.
>
>      Once violated, the rule of law is in danger.
> Unless stopped,
> lawlessness grows. The greater the power of the
> executive grows, the
> more difficult it becomes for the other branches to
> perform their
> constitutional roles. As the executive acts outside
> its constitutionally
> prescribed role and is able to control access to
> information that would
> expose its actions, it becomes increasingly
> difficult for the other
> branches to police it. Once that ability is lost,
> democracy itself is
> threatened and we become a government of men and not
> laws.
>
>      The President's men have minced words about
> America's laws. The
> Attorney General openly conceded that the "kind of
> surveillance" we now
> know they have been conducting requires a court
> order unless authorized
> by statute. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
> Act self-evidently
> does not authorize what the NSA has been doing, and
> no one inside or
> outside the Administration claims that it does.
> Incredibly, the
> Administration claims instead that the surveillance
> was implicitly
> authorized when Congress voted to use force against
> those who attacked
> us on September 11th.
>
>      This argument just does not hold any water.
> Without getting into
> the legal intricacies, it faces a number of
> embarrassing facts. First,
> another admission by the Attorney General: he
> concedes that the
> Administration knew that the NSA project was
> prohibited by existing law
> and that they consulted with some members of
> Congress about changing the
> statute. Gonzalez says that they were told this
> probably would not be
> possible. So how can they now argue that the
> Authorization for the Use
> of Military Force somehow implicitly authorized it
> all along? Second,
> when the Authorization was being debated, the
> Administration did in fact
> seek to have language inserted in it that would have
> authorized them to
> use military force domestically - and the Congress
> did not agree.
> Senator Ted Stevens and Representative Jim McGovern,
> among others, made
> statements during the Authorization debate clearly
> restating that that
> Authorization did not operate domestically.
>
>      When President Bush failed to convince Congress
> to give him all the
> power he wanted when they passed the AUMF, he
> secretly assumed that
> power anyway, as if congressional authorization was
> a useless bother.
> But as Justice Frankfurter once wrote: "To find
> authority so explicitly
> withheld is not merely to disregard in a particular
> instance the clear
> will of Congress. It is to disrespect the whole
> legislative process and
> the constitutional division of authority between
> President and Congress."
>
>      This is precisely the "disrespect" for the law
> that the Supreme
> Court struck down in the steel seizure case.
>
>      It is this same disrespect for America's
> Constitution which has now
> brought our republic to the brink of a dangerous
> breach in the fabric
> of the Constitution. And the disrespect embodied in
> these apparent mass
> violations of the law is part of a larger pattern of
> seeming
> indifference to the Constitution that is deeply
> troubling to millions of
> Americans in both political parties.
>
>      For example, the President has also declared
> that he has a
> heretofore unrecognized inherent power to seize and
> imprison any
> American citizen that he alone determines to be a
> threat to our nation,
> and that, notwithstanding his American citizenship,
> the person
> imprisoned has no right to talk with a lawyer-even
> to argue that the
> President or his appointees have made a mistake and
> imprisoned the wrong
> person.
>
>      The President claims that he can imprison
> American citizens
> indefinitely for the rest of their lives without an
> arrest warrant,
> without notifying them about what charges have been
> filed against them,
> and without informing their families that they have
> been imprisoned.
>
>      At the same time, the Executive Branch has
> claimed a previously
> unrecognized authority to mistreat prisoners in its
> custody in ways that
> plainly constitute torture in a pattern that has now
> been documented in
> U.S. facilities located in several countries around
> the world.
>
>      Over 100 of these captives have reportedly died
> while being
> tortured by Executive Branch interrogators and many
> more have been
> broken and humiliated. In the notorious Abu Ghraib
> prison, investigators
> who documented the pattern of torture estimated that
> more than 90
> percent of the victims were innocent of any charges.
>
>      This shameful exercise of power overturns a set
> of principles that
> our nation has observed since General Washington
> first enunciated them
> during our Revolutionary War and has been observed
> by every president
> since then - until now. These practices violate the
> Geneva Conventions
> and the International Convention Against Torture,
> not to mention our own
> laws against torture.
>
>      The President has also claimed that he has the
> authority to kidnap
> individuals in foreign countries and deliver them
> for imprisonment and
> interrogation on our behalf by autocratic regimes in
> nations that are
> infamous for the cruelty of their techniques for
> torture.
>
>      Some of our traditional allies have been
> shocked by these new
> practices on the part of our nation. The British
> Ambassador to
> Uzbekistan - one of those nations with the worst
> reputations for torture
> in its prisons - registered a complaint to his home
> office about the
> senselessness and cruelty of the new U.S. practice:
> "This material is
> useless - we are selling our souls for dross. It is
> in fact positively
> harmful."
>
>      Can it be true that any president really has
> such powers under our
> Constitution? If the answer is "yes" then under the
> theory by which
> these acts are committed, are there any acts that
> can on their face be
> prohibited? If the President has the inherent
> authority to eavesdrop,
> imprison citizens on his own declaration, kidnap and
> torture, then what
> can't he do?
>
>      The Dean of Yale Law School, Harold Koh, said
> after analyzing the
> Executive Branch's claims of these previously
> unrecognized powers: "If
> the President has commander-in-chief power to commit
> torture, he has the
> power to commit genocide, to sanction slavery, to
> promote apartheid, to
> license summary execution."
>
>      The fact that our normal safeguards have thus
> far failed to contain
> this unprecedented expansion of executive power is
> deeply troubling.
> This failure is due in part to the fact that the
> Executive Branch has
> followed a determined strategy of obfuscating,
> delaying, withholding
> information, appearing to yield but then refusing to
> do so and
> dissembling in order to frustrate the efforts of the
> legislative and
> judicial branches to restore our constitutional
> balance.
>
>      For example, after appearing to support
> legislation sponsored by
> John McCain to stop the continuation of torture, the
> President declared
> in the act of signing the bill that he reserved the
> right not to comply
> with it.
>
>      Similarly, the Executive Branch claimed that it
> could unilaterally
> imprison American citizens without giving them
> access to review by any
> tribunal. The Supreme Court disagreed, but the
> President engaged in
> legal maneuvers designed to prevent the Court from
> providing meaningful
> content to the rights of its citizens.
>
>      A conservative jurist on the Fourth Circuit
> Court of Appeals wrote
> that the Executive Branch's handling of one such
> case seemed to involve
> the sudden abandonment of principle "at substantial
> cost to the
> government's credibility before the courts."
>
>      As a result of its unprecedented claim of new
> unilateral power, the
> Executive Branch has now put our constitutional
> design at grave risk.
> The stakes for America's representative democracy
> are far higher than
> has been generally recognized.
>
>      These claims must be rejected and a healthy
> balance of power
> restored to our Republic. Otherwise, the fundamental
> nature of our
> democracy may well undergo a radical transformation.
>
>      For more than two centuries, America's freedoms
> have been preserved
> in part by our founders' wise decision to separate
> the aggregate power
> of our government into three co-equal branches, each
> of which serves to
> check and balance the power of the other two.
>
>      On more than a few occasions, the dynamic
> interaction among all
> three branches has resulted in collisions and
> temporary impasses that
> create what are invariably labeled "constitutional
> crises." These crises
> have often been dangerous and uncertain times for
> our Republic. But in
> each such case so far, we have found a resolution of
> the crisis by
> renewing our common agreement to live under the rule
> of law.
>
>      The principle alternative to democracy
> throughout history has been
> the consolidation of virtually all state power in
> the hands of a single
> strongman or small group who together exercise that
> power without the
> informed consent of the governed.
>
>      It was in revolt against just such a regime,
> after all, that
> America was founded. When Lincoln declared at the
> time of our greatest
> crisis that the ultimate question being decided in
> the Civil War was
> "whether that nation, or any nation so conceived,
> and so dedicated, can
> long endure," he was not only saving our union but
> also was recognizing
> the fact that democracies are rare in history. And
> when they fail, as
> did Athens and the Roman Republic upon whose designs
> our founders drew
> heavily, what emerges in their place is another
> strongman regime.
>
>      There have of course been other periods of
> American history when
> the Executive Branch claimed new powers that were
> 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.
>
>      When his successor, Thomas Jefferson,
> eliminated the abuses 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 to
> regain the road which alone leads to peace, liberty
> and safety."
>
>      Our greatest President, Abraham Lincoln,
> 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 low point
> for the respect of
> individual rights at the hands of the executive.
> And, during the Vietnam
> War, the notorious COINTELPRO program was part and
> parcel of the abuses
> experienced by Dr. King and thousands of others.
>
>      But in each of these cases, when the conflict
> and turmoil subsided,
> the country recovered its equilibrium and absorbed
> the lessons learned
> in a recurring cycle of excess and regret.
>
>      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 global environment of
> 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. As
> Justice Frankfurter wrote in the 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 believe we may be
> experiencing something new is
> that we are told by the Administration that the war
> footing upon which
> he has tried to place the country is going to "last
> for the rest of our
> lives." So we are told that the conditions of
> national threat that have
> been used by other Presidents to justify arrogations
> of power will
> persist in near perpetuity.
>
>      Third, we need to be aware of the advances in
> eavesdropping and
> surveillance technologies with their capacity to
> sweep up and analyze
> enormous quantities of information and to mine it
> for intelligence. 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. These techologies have the
> potential for shifting
> the balance of power between the apparatus of the
> state and the freedom
> of the individual in ways both subtle and profound.
>
>      Don't misunderstand me: the threat of
> additional terror strikes is
> all too real and their concerted efforts to acquire
> weapons of mass
> destruction does create a real imperative to
> exercise the powers of the
> Executive Branch with swiftness and agility.
> Moreover, there is in fact
> an inherent power that is conferred by the
> Constitution to the President
> to take unilateral action to protect the nation from
> a sudden and
> immediate threat, but 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 years
> that produces a
> serious imbalance in the relationship between the
> executive and the
> other two branches of government.
>
>      There is a final reason to worry that we may be
> experiencing
> something more than just another cycle of overreach
> and regret. This
> Administration has come to power in the thrall of a
> legal theory that
> aims to convince us that this excessive
> concentration of presidential
> authority is exactly what our Constitution intended.
>
>      This legal theory, which its proponents call
> the theory of the
> unitary executive but which is 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
> or checked by
> Congress. 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, domestic and foreign. 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 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 dominance in the world.
>
>      The common denominator seems to be based on an
> instinct to
> intimidate and control.
>
>      This same pattern has characterized the effort
> to silence
> dissenting views within the Executive Branch, to
> censor information that
> may be
> inconsistent with its stated ideological goals, and
> to demand
> conformity from all Executive Branch employees.
>
>      For example, CIA analysts who strongly
> disagreed with the White
> House assertion that Osama bin Laden was linked to
> Saddam Hussein found
> themselves under pressure at work and became fearful
> of losing
> promotions and salary increases.
>
>      Ironically, that is exactly what happened to
> FBI officials in the
> 1960s who disagreed with J. Edgar Hoover's view that
> Dr. King was
> closely connected to Communists. The head of the
> FBI's domestic
> intelligence division said that his effort to tell
> the truth about
> King's innocence of the charge resulted in he and
> his colleagues
> becoming isolated and pressured. "It was evident
> that we had to change
> our ways or we would all be out on the street....
> The men and I
> discussed how to get out of trouble. To be in
> trouble with Mr. Hoover
> was a serious matter. These men were trying to buy
> homes, mortgages on
> homes, children in school. They lived in fear of
> getting transferred,
> losing money on their homes, as they usually did.
> ... so they wanted
> another memorandum written to get us out of the
> trouble that we were in."
>
>      The Constitution's framers understood this
> dilemma as well, as
> Alexander Hamilton put it, "a power over a man's
> support is a power over
> his will." (Federalist No. 73)
>
>      Soon, there was no more difference of opinion
> within the FBI. The
> false accusation became the unanimous view. In
> exactly the same way,
> George Tenet's CIA eventually joined in endorsing a
> manifestly false
> view that there was a linkage between al Qaeda and
> the government of Iraq.
>
>      In the words of George Orwell: "We are all
> capable of believing
> things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we
> are finally proved
> wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show
> that we were right.
> Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this
> process for an
> indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner
> or later a false
> belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a
> battlefield."
>
>      Whenever power is unchecked and unaccountable
> it almost inevitably
> leads to mistakes and abuses. In the absence of
> rigorous
> accountability, incompetence flourishes. Dishonesty
> is encouraged and
> rewarded.
>
>      Last week, for example, Vice President Cheney
> attempted to defend
> the Administration's eavesdropping on American
> citizens by saying that
> if it had conducted this program prior to 9/11, they
> would have found
> out the names of some of the hijackers.
>
>      Tragically, he apparently still doesn't know
> that the
> Administration did in fact have the names of at
> least 2 of the hijackers
> well before 9/11 and had available to them
> information that could have
> easily led to the identification of most of the
> other hijackers. And
> yet, because of incompetence in the handling of this
> information, it was
> never used to protect the American people.
>
>      It is often the case that an Executive Branch
> beguiled by the
> pursuit of unchecked power responds to its own
> mistakes by reflexively
> proposing that it be given still more power. Often,
> the request itself
> it used to mask accountability for mistakes in the
> use of power it
> already has.
>
>      Moreover, if the pattern of practice begun by
> this Administration
> is not challenged, it may well become a permanent
> part of the American
> system. Many conservatives have pointed out that
> granting unchecked
> power to this President means that the next
> President will have
> unchecked power as well. And the next President may
> be someone whose
> values and belief you do not trust. And this is why
> Republicans as well
> as Democrats should be concerned with what this
> President has done. If
> this President's attempt to dramatically expand
> executive power goes
> unquestioned, our constitutional design of checks
> and balances will be
> lost. And the next President or some future
> President will be able, in
> the name of national security, to restrict our
> liberties in a way the
> framers never would have thought possible.
>
>      The same instinct to expand its power and to
> establish dominance
> characterizes the relationship between this
> Administration and the
> courts and the Congress.
>
>      In a properly functioning system, the Judicial
> Branch would serve
> as the constitutional umpire to ensure that the
> branches of government
> observed their proper spheres of authority, observed
> civil liberties and
> adhered to the rule of law. Unfortunately, the
> unilateral executive has
> tried hard to thwart the ability of the judiciary to
> call balls and
> strikes by keeping controversies out of its hands -
> notably those
> challenging its ability to detain individuals
> without legal process - by
> appointing judges who will be deferential to its
> exercise of power and
> by its support of assaults on the independence of
> the third branch.
>
>      The President's decision to ignore FISA was a
> direct assault on the
> power of the judges who sit on that court. Congress
> established the
> FISA court precisely to be a check on executive
> power to wiretap. Yet,
> to ensure that the court could not function as a
> check on executive
> power, the President simply did not take matters to
> it and did not let
> the court know that it was being bypassed.
>
>      The President's judicial appointments are
> clearly designed to
> ensure that the courts will not serve as an
> effective check on executive
> power. As we have all learned, Judge Alito is a
> longtime supporter of a
> powerful executive - a supporter of the so-called
> unitary executive,
> which is more properly called the unilateral
> executive. Whether you
> support his confirmation or not - and I do not - we
> must all agree that
> he will not vote as an effective check on the
> expansion of executive
> power. Likewise, Chief Justice Roberts has made
> plain his deference to
> the expansion of executive power through his support
> of judicial
> deference to executive agency rulemaking.
>
>      And the Administration has supported the
> assault on judicial
> independence that has been conducted largely in
> Congress. That assault
> includes a threat by the Republican majority in the
> Senate to
> permanently change the rules to eliminate the right
> of the minority to
> engage in extended debate of the President's
> judicial nominees. The
> assault has extended to legislative efforts to
> curtail the jurisdiction
> of courts in matters ranging from habeas corpus to
> the pledge of
> allegiance. In short, the Administration has
> demonstrated its contempt
> for the judicial role and sought to evade judicial
> review of its actions
> at every turn.
>
>      But the most serious damage has been done to
> the legislative
> branch. The sharp decline of congressional power and
> autonomy in recent
> years has been almost as shocking as the efforts by
> the Executive Branch
> to attain a massive expansion of its power.
>
>      I was elected to Congress in 1976 and served
> eight years in the
> house, 8 years in the Senate and presided over the
> Senate for 8 years as
> Vice President. As a young man, I saw the Congress
> first hand as the son
> of a Senator. My father was elected to Congress in
> 1938, 10 years
> before I was born, and left the Senate in 1971.
>
>      The Congress we have today is unrecognizable
> compared to the one in
> which my father served. There are many distinguished
> Senators and
> Congressmen serving today. I am honored that some of
> them are here in
> this hall. But the legislative branch of government
> under its current
> leadership now operates as if it is entirely
> subservient to the
> Executive Branch.
>
>      Moreover, too many Members of the House and
> Senate now feel
> compelled to spend a majority of their time not in
> thoughtful debate of
> the issues, but raising money to purchase 30 second
> TV commercials.
>
>      There have now been two or three generations of
> congressmen who
> don't really know what an oversight hearing is. In
> the 70's and 80's,
> the oversight hearings in which my colleagues and I
> participated held
> the feet of the Executive Branch to the fire - no
> matter which party was
> in power. Yet oversight is almost unknown in the
> Congress today.
>
>      The role of authorization committees has
> declined into
> insignificance. The 13 annual appropriation bills
> are hardly ever
> actually passed anymore. Everything is lumped into a
> single giant
> measure that is not even available for Members of
> Congress to read
> before they vote on it.
>
>      Members of the minority party are now routinely
> excluded from
> conference committees, and amendments are routinely
> not allowed during
> floor consideration of legislation.
>
>      In the United States Senate, which used to
> pride itself on being
> the "greatest deliberative body in the world,"
> meaningful debate is now
> a rarity. Even on the eve of the fateful vote to
> authorize the invasion
> of Iraq, Senator Robert Byrd famously asked: "Why is
> this chamber empty?"
>
>      In the House of Representatives, the number who
> face a genuinely
> competitive election contest every two years is
> typically less than a
> dozen out of 435.
>
>      And too many incumbents have come to believe
> that the key to
> continued access to the money for re-election is to
> stay on the good
> side of those who have the money to give; and, in
> the case of the
> majority party, the whole process is largely
> controlled by the incumbent
> president and his political organization.
>
>      So the willingness of Congress to challenge the
> Administration is
> further limited when the same party controls both
> Congress and the
> Executive Branch.
>
>      The Executive Branch, time and again, has
> co-opted Congress' role,
> and often Congress has been a willing accomplice in
> the surrender of
> its own power.
>
>      Look for example at the Congressional role in
> "overseeing" this
> massive four year eavesdropping campaign that on its
> face seemed so
> clearly to violate the Bill of Rights. The President
> says he informed
> Congress, but what he really means is that he talked
> with the chairman
> and  ranking member of the House and Senate
> intelligence committees and
> the top leaders of the House and Senate. This small
> group, in turn,
> claimed that they were not given the full facts,
> though at least one of
> the intelligence committee leaders handwrote a
> letter of concern to VP
> Cheney and placed a copy in his own safe.
>
>      Though I sympathize with the awkward position
> in which these men
> and women were placed, I cannot disagree with the
> Liberty Coalition when
> it says that Democrats as well as Republicans in the
> Congress must
> share the blame for not taking action to protest and
> seek to prevent
> what they consider a grossly unconstitutional
> program.
>
>      Moreover, in the Congress as a whole - both
> House and Senate - the
> enhanced role of money in the re-election process,
> coupled with the
> sharply diminished role for reasoned deliberation
> and debate, has
> produced an atmosphere conducive to pervasive
> institutionalized corruption.
>
>      The Abramoff scandal is but the tip of a giant
> iceberg that
> threatens the integrity of the entire legislative
> branch of government.
>
>      It is the pitiful state of our legislative
> branch which primarily
> explains the failure of our vaunted checks and
> balances to prevent the
> dangerous overreach by our Executive Branch which
> now threatens a
> radical transformation of the American system.
>
>      I call upon Democratic and Republican members
> of Congress today to
> uphold your oath of office and defend the
> Constitution. Stop going
> along to get along. Start acting like the
> independent and co-equal
> branch of government you're supposed to be.
>
>      But there is yet another Constitutional player
> whose pulse must be
> taken and whose role must be examined in order to
> understand the
> dangerous imbalance that has emerged with the
> efforts by the Executive
> Branch to dominate our constitutional system.
>
>      We the people are - collectively - still the
> key to the survival of
> America's democracy. We - as Lincoln put it, "[e]ven
> we here" - must
> examine our own role as citizens in allowing and not
> preventing the
> shocking decay and degradation of our democracy.
>
>      Thomas Jefferson said: "An informed citizenry
> is the only true
> repository of the public will."
>
>      The revolutionary departure on which the idea
> of America was based
> was the audacious belief that people can govern
> themselves and
> responsibly exercise the ultimate authority in
> self-government. This
> insight proceeded inevitably from the bedrock
> principle articulated by
> the Enlightenment philosopher John Locke: "All just
> power is derived
> from the consent of the governed."
>
>      The intricate and carefully balanced
> constitutional system that is
> now in such danger was created with the full and
> widespread
> participation of the population as a whole. The
> Federalist Papers were,
> back in the day, widely-read newspaper essays, and
> they represented only
> one of twenty-four series of essays that crowded the
> vibrant marketplace
> of ideas in which farmers and shopkeepers
> recapitulated the debates that
> played out so fruitfully in Philadelphia.
>
>      Indeed, when the Convention had done its best,
> it was the people -
> in their various States - that refused to confirm
> the result until, at
> their insistence, the Bill of Rights was made
> integral to the document
> sent forward for ratification.
>
>      And it is "We the people" who must now find
> once again the ability
> we once had to play an integral role in saving our
> Constitution.
>
>      And here there is cause for both concern and
> great hope. The age of
> printed pamphlets and political essays has long
> since been replaced by
> television - a distracting and absorbing medium
> which sees determined
> to entertain and sell more than it informs and
> educates.
>
>      Lincoln's memorable call during the Civil War
> is applicable in a
> new way to our dilemma today: "We must disenthrall
> ourselves, and then
> we shall save our country."
>
>      Forty years have passed since the majority of
> Americans adopted
> television as their principal source of information.
> Its dominance has
> become so extensive that virtually all significant
> political
> communication now takes place within the confines of
> flickering
> 30-second television advertisements.
>
>      And the political economy supported by these
> short but expensive
> television ads is as different from the vibrant
> politics of America's
> first century as those politics were different from
> the feudalism which
> thrived on the ignorance of the masses of people in
> the Dark Ages.
>
>      The constricted role of ideas in the American
> political system
> today has encouraged efforts by the Executive Branch
> to control the flow
> of information as a means of controlling the outcome
> of important
> decisions that still lie in the hands of the people.
>
>      The Administration vigorously asserts its power
> to maintain the
> secrecy of its operations. After all, the other
> branches can't check an
> abuse of power if they don't know it is happening.
>
>      For example, when the Administration was
> attempting to persuade
> Congress to enact the Medicare prescription drug
> benefit, many in the
> House and Senate raised concerns about the cost and
> design of the program.
> But, rather than engaging in open debate on the
> basis of factual data,
> the Administration withheld facts and prevented the
> Congress from
> hearing testimony that it sought from the principal
> administration
> expert who had compiled information showing in
> advance of the vote that
> indeed the true cost estimates were far higher than
> the numbers given to
> Congress by the President.
>
>      Deprived of that information, and believing the
> false numbers given
> to it instead, the Congress approved the program.
> Tragically, the
> entire initiative is now collapsing - all over the
> country - with the
> Administration making an appeal just this weekend to
> major insurance
> companies to volunteer to bail it out.
>
>      To take another example, scientific warnings
> about the catastrophic
> consequences of unchecked global warming were
> censored by a political
> appointee in the White House who had no scientific
> training. And today
> one of the leading scientific experts on global
> warming in NASA has been
> ordered not to talk to members of the press and to
> keep a careful log
> of everyone he meets with so that the Executive
> Branch can monitor and
> control his discussions of global warming.
>
>      One of the other ways the Administration has
> tried to control the
> flow of information is by consistently resorting to
> the language and
> politics of fear in order to short-circuit the
> debate and drive its
> agenda forward without regard to the evidence or the
> public interest. As
> President Eisenhower said, "Any who act as if
> freedom's defenses are to
> be found in suppression and suspicion and fear
> confess a doctrine that
> is alien to America."
>
>      Fear drives out reason. Fear suppresses the
> politics of discourse
> and opens the door to the politics of destruction.
> Justice Brandeis once
> wrote: "Men feared witches and burnt women."
>
>      The founders of our country faced dire threats.
> If they failed in
> their endeavors, they would have been hung as
> traitors. The very
> existence of our country was at risk.
>
>      Yet, in the teeth of those dangers, they
> insisted on establishing
> the Bill of Rights.
>
>      Is our Congress today in more danger than were
> their predecessors
> when the British army was marching on the Capitol?
> Is the world more
> dangerous than when we faced an ideological enemy
> with tens of thousands
> of missiles poised to be launched against us and
> annihilate our country
> at a moment's notice? Is America in more danger now
> than when we faced
> worldwide fascism on the march - when our fathers
> fought and won two
> World Wars simultaneously?
>
>      It is simply an insult to those who came before
> us and sacrificed
> so much on our behalf to imply that we have more to
> be fearful of than
> they. Yet they faithfully protected our freedoms and
> now it is up to us
> to do the same.
>
>      We have a duty as Americans to defend our
> citizens' right not only
> to life but also to liberty and the pursuit of
> happiness. It is
> therefore vital in our current circumstances that
> immediate steps be
> taken to safeguard our Constitution against the
> present danger posed by
> the intrusive overreaching on the part of the
> Executive Branch and the
> President's apparent belief that he need not live
> under the rule of law.
>
>      I endorse the words of Bob Barr, when he said,
> "The President has
> dared the American people to do something about it.
> For the sake of the
> Constitution, I hope they will."
>
>      A special counsel should immediately be
> appointed by the Attorney
> General to remedy the obvious conflict of interest
> that prevents him
> from investigating what many believe are serious
> violations of law by
> the President. We have had a fresh demonstration of
> how an independent
> investigation by a special counsel with integrity
> can rebuild confidence
> in our system of justice. Patrick Fitzgerald has, by
> all accounts, shown
> neither fear nor favor in pursuing allegations that
> the Executive Branch
> has violated other laws.
>
>      Republican as well as Democratic members of
> Congress should support
> the bipartisan call of the Liberty Coalition for the
> appointment of a
> special counsel to pursue the criminal issues raised
> by warrantless
> wiretapping of Americans by the President.
>
>      Second, new whistleblower protections should
> immediately be
> established for members of the Executive Branch who
> report evidence of
> wrongdoing - especially where it involves the abuse
> of Executive Branch
> authority in the sensitive areas of national
> security.
>
>      Third, both Houses of Congress should hold
> comprehensive - and not
> just superficial - hearings into these serious
> allegations of criminal
> behavior on the part of the President. And, they
> should follow the
> evidence wherever it leads.
>
>      Fourth, the extensive new powers requested by
> the Executive Branch
> in its proposal to extend and enlarge the Patriot
> Act should, under no
> circumstances be granted, unless and until there are
> adequate and
> enforceable safeguards to protect the Constitution
> and the rights of the
> American people against the kinds of abuses that
> have so recently been
> revealed.
>
>      Fifth, any telecommunications company that has
> provided the
> government with access to private information
> concerning the
> communications of Americans without a proper warrant
> should immediately
> cease and desist their complicity in this apparently
> illegal invasion of
> the privacy of American citizens.
>
>      Freedom of communication is an essential
> prerequisite for the
> restoration of the health of our democracy.
>
>      It is particularly important that the freedom
> of the Internet be
> protected against either the encroachment of
> government or the efforts
> at control by large media conglomerates. The future
> of our democracy
> depends on it.
>
>      I mentioned that along with cause for concern,
> there is reason for
> hope. As I stand here today, I am filled with
> optimism that America is
> on the eve of a golden age in which the vitality of
> our democracy will
> be re-established and will flourish more vibrantly
> than ever. Indeed I
> can feel it in this hall.
>
>      As Dr. King once said, "Perhaps a new spirit is
> rising among us. If
> it is, let us trace its movements and pray that our
> own inner being may
> be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in
> need of a new way
> beyond the darkness that seems so close around us."
>
>
>
> "If all that Americans want is security, they can go
> to prison. They'll
> have enough to eat, a bed and a roof over their
> heads. But if an
> American wants to preserve his dignity and his
> equality as a human
> being, he must not bow his neck to any dictatorial
> government."
> - - Dwight D. Eisenhower
> "
>
> Hoe staat het eigenlijk met onze democratie?
>
>
> Henk Elegeert
>
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