WATCH BUSH; CONGRESS SURE WON'T'
Thursday, January 20
By Jay Bookman, Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Today, President Bush will raise his right hand and once again pledge to defend and uphold the Constitution of the United States of America. I do not at all question the president's sincerity in that pledge.
However, I will admit to deep misgivings about how Bush will carry it out. In fact, I will be surprised, even shocked, if the Bush administration does not overreach in the next four years and create the most serious constitutional crisis we have faced in generations. I don't know how exactly, but I think the conditions are ripe.
I recognize that's a serious charge, not to be made cavalierly. So let me make my case.
First, the Bush administration may be the most radical in the nation's history. That in itself is not a criticism.
Radical ideas are not wrong merely because they are radical. From time to time, radical changes are absolutely necessary to bring a slow-adapting government up to date with modern challenges. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a radical president, as was Abraham Lincoln.
And both, by the way, created serious constitutional crises.
The Bush administration is also driven by a sense of mission, which for many Americans is its most attractive attribute. However, human beings motivated by a sense of mission have a dangerous tendency to see laws as obstacles to be hurdled rather than rules to be followed. That's not a criticism, either, just an observation.
So, more than most, those driven by missionary fervor need the protection offered by a strong system of checks and balances. As radicals themselves, our Founding Fathers understood the importance of such a system.
Unfortunately, the checks and balances they created are not working as well as they should.
With Republicans in control of both the House and Senate, and with GOP members kept in line by a party discipline unparalleled in recent history, Congress has effectively been neutered as a constitutional check. The idea of a House committee aggressively investigating the Bush administration has become downright laughable, and the administration knows it.
The same is true within the government bureaucracy. Take the CIA as an example. With the installation of Porter Goss as director, and with the ouster of many of the agency's longtime professionals, the institutional resistance within the CIA to extra-legal or extra-constitutional actions has been greatly weakened.
Even the Justice Department, which played a critical role in standing up to President Richard Nixon in the Watergate scandal, will be headed by a Bush loyalist, Alberto Gonzales. Much was made of the fact that in his confirmation hearing, Gonzales stepped away from his previous defense of torture as a useful policy. Far more important, but little noted, was Gonzales' continued claim that the president retains the power to override federal anti-torture law if he chooses to do so. In essence, we have the nation's top law enforcement official
arguing in public that the president is above the law.
That concept has critical implications. Early in the Bush administration, in the wake of Sept. 11, the Justice Department produced secret legal memos building a case that as commander in chief, Bush has the unilateral power to attack any nation he chooses, even those that played no role in the terror attacks. The memos implied that the constitutional requirement for congressional approval of war-making, like the Geneva
Conventions, had been rendered "quaint." Those memos, and that line of thinking, have never been repudiated by the administration.
As for the Democrats, they bear almost equal blame for the current situation. In the open marketplace of ideas, good ideas are supposed to drive out bad ideas. But for the most part, the modern Democratic Party has withdrawn from that competition, offering few new ideas to offset those aggressively marketed by the GOP. Despite conservative complaints about a liberal press, even the media have been largely intimidated into silence.
That sets up a dangerous situation, and it is dangerous most of all to the Bush administration. In the next four years, it has only its own restraint to protect it. I doubt that will be enough.
Jay Bookman is the AJC deputy editorial page editor.
© 2005 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
:
ajc.com |
