The Silent Coup - How a nation ruled by law, becomes a nation ruled by men

“…what came out is that the government admitted for the first time that what they were talking about was not really this Terrorist Surveillance Program, but rather data mining. And this is the first time that the administration has actually admitted that they are doing this data mining, which the USA Today leaked. The data mining intercepts millions and millions of phone calls and email communications to track what the patterns are, but experts inside the administration say that, in fact, they also have access to the content of the communication. So we have no idea, and Congress probably doesn’t either, of the scope of all of these so-called intelligence activities, which, by all accounts, are not making us any safer”.

There were many oversight hearings into the Justice Departments actions and intentions when it had been revealed that the President had conducted wiretapping outside legal regulations and without formal congressional approval or process.  The same department also found itself being questioned about the dismissal of several US attorneys, and whether improper reasons had played into the decision to replace them. At the center was US Attorney General – basically chief legal council to the President – Alberto Gonzales, head of the Justice Department. It was easy for those who followed these hearings to get the impression that Gonzales did not do a very good job during these sessions. He mainly claimed he could not recall, or he could not say due to classified information and ongoing investigation or some other reason.

 However, as an article in Slate Magazine reflected: 

“…it occurs to me that when I find myself in enthusiastic agreement …//…that Alberto Gonzales disgraced himself yesterday, I may have missed something important. Assuming the president watched so much as 10 minutes of his attorney general being pole axed by even rudimentary questions from the Senate judiciary committee, it strains credulity to believe that Gonzales still has Bush's "full confidence."

Until you stop to consider that the president wasn't watching the same movie as the rest of us and that Gonzales wasn't reading from the same script. Perhaps what we witnessed yesterday was in fact a tour de force, a home run for the president's overarching theory of the unitary executive. 

The theory of the unitary executive is a radical vision of executive power in which the president is the big boss of the entire executive branch and has final say over everything that happens within it. At its core, the theory holds that Congress has very limited authority to divest the president of those powers. An expanded version of this theory was the legal predicate for the torture memo: "In light of the president's complete authority over the conduct of war, without a clear statement otherwise, criminal statutes are not read as infringing on the president's ultimate authority in these areas. … Congress may no more regulate the president's ability to detain and interrogate enemy combatants than it may regulate his ability to direct troop movements on the battlefield."” 

It was largely thanks to personal consciousness and responsibility of individuals within the agencies of the executive branch, that information about some aspects of this massive push for practical implementation of the unitary executive theory escaped the stranglehold of secrecy.

These were precisely the same people that the strategists for the implementation of the unitary executive theory had felt the need to be kept in dark for fear that they might do precisely what they actually did.

People inside the administration that felt that there were attacks on the Constitution and violations of both the law and their own sense of right and wrong, ordered by the White House. We are all in debt to the courage of these people.  

The divide between corporate owned media and independent media became practically significant in the dealing with these leaked pieces of an overall pattern. It was mainly in the independent media that dots were connected to point to something larger than just separate incidences of presidential overreach.  

Sadly this was also true for the response from the Democrat opposition – even though they regained majority in both houses of congress in November 2006.

There was far too soon a willingness to focus on how to amend the Foreign Surveillance Act, rather than deal with the outright and obvious violations of it that had been taking place in secret on the President’s order for several years. There has yet to be either a serious attempt at investigating and pursuing possible criminal charges, nor has there been much investigation into the full scope of the violations – even when it became clear that there was much more that had been done without congressional approval and judicial allowance as more information was leaked and dug up. 

The firing of attorneys, warrantless surveillance, the use of questionable interrogation techniques and the extensive use of “signing statements” and “executive privilege” to wriggle the executive branch out of the oversight and will of the legislative branch – these were some of the issues which were placed – largely by Democrats – on the political agenda of hearings and debates.

However, what was rarely addressed was that all these “oversteps” of the administration was attempts of pushing the limits, to – if successful – increase the room of presidential authority and control. 

Nor were they rebutted the way necessary to ensure that the legislative branch did not loose power to the executive. There was too much willingness to see it all as the result of bad legal advise, and they either couldn’t or wouldn’t go to the same lengths to force compliance with subpoenas, accountability or oversight that their Republican colleagues, the President and his staff has used to further their political objectives.  

It is true that some laws were amended and bills were passed after the Democratic took back both Houses, to fill some of the dangerous loopholes in the wording that allowed for far too much unaccountability and far too little insight.

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