This is a second posting in a series dealing with the challenges that face the incoming Obama Administration. Although I strongly disagree with Andrew Sullivan's prescription for fiscal responsibility ("entitlement" elimination--ie, reducing benefits for the middle and lower classes, but never paying attention to the much larger "entitlements" built into the tax code for wealthy investors; flat taxes--ie, progressive taxation with a zero exemption, but so unreasonably low a rate and so few distinctions that the rich get incredibly richer without fairly shouldering the burden), his eloquent articulation of the bankruptcy of the Bush-Cheney administration's decimation of American constitutional protections would be hard to beat.
A significant challenge for Obama, and something that I suspect every supporter hopes he makes the highest priority item on his agenda, is to restore to the American people and in America's actions throughout the domestic and foreign spheres the constitutional freedoms that have been abrogated by the criminal occupants of the White House.
Here are a few excerpts. Read the rest (just disregard the tax preferences).
[T]he core event of the last eight years [is] the collapse of constitutional order and the rule of law[,]fomented in a mixture of hubris and laziness by the president himself. It is now indisputable that the president and vice-president of the United States engineered a de facto coup against the constitution after 9/11, declaring themselves above any law, any treaty, and any basic moral norm in their misguided mission to rid the world of evil.
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They declared [the executive] power to be unlimited; they asserted also that it was as permanent as the emergency they declared; they claimed their dictatorial powers were inherent in the presidency itself, and above any legal constraints; they ordered their own lawyers to provide retroactive and laughable legal immunity for their crimes; they by-passed all the usual and necessary checks within the executive branch to ensure prudence and legality and self-doubt in the conduct of a war; they asserted that emergency war powers applied to the territory of the United States itself; they claimed the right to seize anyone - anyone, citizen or not - they deemed an "enemy combatant," to hold them indefinitely with no due process and to torture them until they became incoherent, broken, brutalized shells of human beings, if they survived at all. They did this to the guilty and they did this to the innocent. But they also had no way of reliably knowing which was which and who was who. Never before in wartime has the precious, sacred inheritance of free people been treated with such contempt by the leaders of the democratic West.
Obama, therefore, must erase every remnant of this humiliating defeat of the Cnstitution from the federal government.
His interaction with other governments must reflect this nation's fundamental abhorrence of imperialism and war, by treating war as a last resort and diplomacy as the primary tool of foreign policy.
His actions on Guantanamo must reinstate the Geneva Conventions and the rights of prisoners.
- Nevermore should flimsy legal arguments like those advanced by Jay Bybee and John Yoo be allowed to pervert Constitutional protections and international norms.
- We must never again allow our government to permit torture or murder in our names.
- We must never permit our national security efforts to become so corrupted by the infantile desire to please a corrupt administration that the intelligence derived cannot be trusted.
His actions on domestic surveillance must reinstate the boundary between foreign wars (military involvement) and domestic criminal prosecutions (domestic law enforcement)
- Nevermore should a U.S. citizen be seized and held by that citizen's own government without the fundamental habeas corpus, due process and equal protection rights guaranteed by the Constitution.
His appointees must be ardent supporters of the fundamental importance of the Constitutional checks and balances that prevent presidencies from becoming dictatorships or executive offices from becoming tools to enrich the coffers of influential supporters.
- His appointees to the Supreme Court must enforce the separation of powers and checks and balances provided by the Constitution, reflecting a progressive understanding of the tyranny of presidential refusal to enforce the law and the misery of presidential usurpation of legislative and judicial authority.
- His appointees to executive positions must be willing participants in a transparent administration that reduces the power of corporatism, cronyism and corruption by making public their interactions with everyone--a schedule of all appointments and phone calls of all political appointees in every agency of the federal government should be posted on the official website of that agency in a timely fashion, for the perusal of the public that official represents.
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