Bush and Cheney have stripped the people of this country of protections under Amendments 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8, not to mention 13 and 15. We now arrive at the question of whether there is any life left in Amendments 9 and 10. The Ninth Amendment reads:
"The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
The Tenth Amendment reads:
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
If those people referred to in that old document still exist anywhere, it is in Brattleboro, Vermont. And nowhere does the Constitution deny the people of Brattleboro the power to arrest, detain, or try in a fair trial individuals whom they have probable cause to believe guilty of mass murder.
Imagine if one of the esteemed Selectmen in Brattleboro were discovered to be accepting bribes, handing out public dollars to his friends, and torturing children in the basement. Would an appropriate response be "How awful, but you know he's retiring in another year and those children are used to being tortured by now anyway?" That response is not even imaginable.
But when the crime becomes larger and less intimate, when we begin discussing hundreds of thousands of murders and countless cases of torture carried out at a distance by loyal underlings, all of a sudden our conviction that accountability is called for becomes less absolute. Why, though, should the need for accountability shrink as the crime grows? This makes no sense to me and would have made none to the authors of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
Now, that Constitution provides very prominently and discusses in six places a remedy for presidents and vice presidents who abuse it. In such cases, the Congress can impeach, try, remove from office, and bar from ever holding office again. But Article I, Section 3 also says:
"the Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and punishment, according to Law."
In other words, whether a president or vice president or other civil officer of the United States is impeached and convicted in the U.S. Senate or not, he or she is subject before, during, or following that process to exactly what Brattleboro may propose to do on Tuesday.
And I would suggest that the failure of Congress to even consider impeachment gives Brattleboro and every other town in this country something more than the right to take justice into their own hands. We have a responsibility to make use of our democracy in those places where it still resides, where money and military and media have not killed it off. We have a duty, not just a right, to attempt at this late hour to make this again a nation ruled not by men but by laws.
The United States Department of Justice could take up this matter at the national level, it's true. It's also true that a chicken can squawk before a fox comes in the door. It's true that Blackwater can investigate itself. It's true that the New York Times comes with a built-in critic of its own mistakes. The trouble is that the Department of Justice is now an arm of the Republican Party. The most spineless Congress in the history of the country has asked that Justice Department to hold noncompliant witnesses in contempt, and it has refused.
Congress has a tool called inherent contempt in which the Capitol Police arrest and hold witnesses on Capitol Hill, but our invertebrate representatives are afraid to use that even on former staffers. They are not about to use it on Bush and Cheney.
We are in completely uncharted waters in Washington. We have not only unprecedented spinelessness from the first branch of our government, but we have previously unimagined offenses by the second branch, offenses that can best be called, in the words of the Brattleboro initiative, crimes against the Constitution.
Congress can now pass horrendous bills that become law or good bills that get vetoed. Or it can pass mixed bills in which the bad parts become law, but anything Bush doesn't like is undone with a signing statement. Yes, previous presidents wrote signing statements, but not in this volume and not in this way, not to announce the intention to violate laws and proceed to violate them. Congress has held hearings on this and countless other abuses. Some of these hearings lay out all the facts, but then nothing is done because the only thing Congress could do would be to impeach, and that would require integrity. At other hearings, witnesses don't show up, or show up having forgotten everything prior to breakfast that day. And Congress thanks them for coming, turns the other cheek, and begs to be slapped. Sometimes an abused spouse needs an intervention from a friend, and Congress right now has no better friend than the people of Brattleboro, Vermont.
Who would dare tell Brattleboro it is not its place to act? In recent times, we have seen nations around the world indict foreign criminals for crimes committed elsewhere. The crimes of Bush and Cheney directly impact the people of Brattleboro. The people of Brattleboro have officially paid some $11 million so far to occupy Iraq, or six times that if you consider the costs calculated by nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz. Vermont and Brattleboro have lost lives in Iraq and Afghanistan, and had lives devastated. Vermont's national guard has been sent to guard somebody else's nation. You have the right to bear arms, but they have the right to put you on a plane and ship you to wherever the most oil is.
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