Senators Feinstein and Shumer have decided to support Mukasey in the Judiciary Committee, a move that means that Mukasey will be confirmed. Confirmed despite his having made declarations in front of the committee that declare the president above the law, not bound by law, while also side-stepping the issue of whether waterboarding captives is against American law and international treaty.
What makes Feinstein’s and Shumer's move JUST WRONG here is that they're not looking at –or maybe caring about?—what’s at stake here. It may well be true that Makasey is as good a man as we might reasonably hope for out of this regime. But Mukasey said some things about presidential power (like that the commander in chief doesn’t necessarily have to obey a constitutional federal statute) that show that he’d just be an extension of the lawless presidency, not a check upon it. And the Congress has no business accepting this.
What’s at stake here is bigger than who fills the AG’s office: it is the larger message of defining what this country is and is not. With this regime, we've become something that is contrary to what we used to say we represented: honest government accountable to the people and operating under the rule of law.
Yet here are these two Democratic Senators giving the man who made these unacceptable statements to take office without making the necessary statements and promises that this moment of leverage --the confirmation process- may make possible to extract. Or to then have a noble conflict with the lawless executive in defense of the basic soul of American democracy.
Just contrast this with the confirmation of Eliot Richardson in the midst of Watergate. He had to promise to appoint a special prosecutor in order to get the position. Congress extracted major concessions –the issue then, too, focusing on the rule of law—as the price of confirmation.
Compare that with the present sorry performance. Now, with this nomination, with so much more lawlessness involved than at the time of Watergate—by a whole order of magnitude, if not two—and with the new Attorney-General-designate declaring the president above the law, the Congress does not use this occasion to confront the lawless president and, as the price of confirmation, compel concessions to re-establish the rule of law.
The Congress does not use this as an opportunity to establish that the U.S. is obliged by treaty and by law not to waterboard, that a president cannot order searches without getting warrants, that prisoners and accuseds have rights that the government must respect, and that the president is not permitted to systematically deceive Congress on matters of grave import, like war and peace.
At the time of Watergate, I was not so impressed with what the Congress did in confronting Nixon. But by comparison with now, the men and women of that Congress were veritable heroes of the people, working together to protect the integrity of America.
Feinstein and Shumer apparently don’t see the sorry light shed by that discrepancy, or don’t see that as being terribly important, and these two Senators decide --despite all the fundamentally unAmerican ugliness we have seen from Alberto Gonzalez and the perversion of the justice department-- that it’s not necessary to take a stand here to insist that the attorney general’s office be an agent of the rule of law and not of its subversion.
That is indeed the question: will the attorney general’s office be an agent of the rule of law or will it be an agent of its subversion?
That's what's at stake, and an issue like this is just too important for Feinstein and Shumer to allow it to be subordinated to any other consideration. In our times, there is no more important question. For all the other questions depend on our preserving our constitutional democracy.
And not only is a moral obligation and part of their sworn duty to protect the Constitution, but it would also be good politics. This is one more teachable moment, and this cave-in only squanders yet another such opportunity to dramatise to the American people what this regime is about and why it must be held in check, if not impeached.
Andrew Bard Schmookler's website www.nonesoblind.org is devoted to understanding the roots of America's present moral crisis and the means by which the urgent challenge of this dangerous moment can be met. Dr. Schmookler is also the author of such books as The Parable of the Tribes: The Problem of Power in Social Evolution (SUNY Press) and Debating the Good Society: A Quest to Bridge America's Moral Divide (M.I.T. Press). He also conducts regular talk-radio conversations in both red and blue states.
Is this more than a wish? A major party has not "gone" in that sense since the early 1850s. No major party has come into existence since that same decade-- a hundred and fifty years ago.
THere's a whole lot more history of parties being led in new directions --consider the fascist takeover of the Republicans in the past generation-- than of parties "going" and being replaced at the center of power by some new organization.
by
Andrew Bard Schmookler (314 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 146 comments)
on Sunday, November 4, 2007 at 4:46:25 PM
It is likely that the only way to get representative government back is to organize like the civil rights movement. This is the only time our government makes any attempt to represent the people. They are afraid of a rebellion like the American Revolution.
The National Initiative for Democracy may make this revolution unnecessary. Please check it out and then vote on it.
It will give the people the right to a National Initiative.
And find their sanity. Stop supporting Democrats as if they offer anything worthwhile in terms of restoring American democracy and the rule of law. Yes, overcoming the two-party duopoly is terribly difficult, but we have no other choice as true dissidents (not you Democratic apologists) but to face the challenge. Start with boycotting 2008 federal elections, and also come over to www.foavc.org and join the movement to use the constitutional option the Founders gave us in case we lost trust in the federal government.
by
Joel S. Hirschhorn (132 articles, 34 quicklinks, 60 diaries, 526 comments)
on Sunday, November 4, 2007 at 5:10:08 PM
Last time you came in like this --and it was with a similar thrust and tone-- I asked you some questions about this envisioned "solution" of yours. In capsule form, what I asked was on what basis you imagined that a constitutional convention of today --with the American public as it has shown itself to be, with the nature of the whole workings of power in America, with the present state of American consciousness and thought processes-- could be counted upon to make great improvements over what that extraordinary group of our Founders created a couple of centuries ago.
I see that you are still entertaining the same fantasy. But if you did supply an answer to my question, I didn't see it.
by
Andrew Bard Schmookler (314 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 146 comments)
on Sunday, November 4, 2007 at 7:17:43 PM
As Andrew rightly said to another commenter what are you going to put in its place? when and How?
Who is going to decide what goes where, you?
No offence intended but I hope it's better thought out.
Just for interest are you or have you joined either party and tried to change things internally? My guess is that you haven’t and if you did it was only for a short time. Patience and doggedness is more that the province of crusty old men it’s reality.
People rarely accept sudden and dramatic changes. Stephen Jay Gould who came up with the concept of punctuated equilibrium. Briefly it means is that development is never even no is it linear it happens in a series of steps. Pressure mounts until it reaches a point whereby it forces the next step and the whole process starts again. In this way not all movements are forward but the effect over time is.
Party government sucks big time but it's better than the alternative. I advocate punctuated equilibrium for all Sociological issues as that tends not to frighten the masses into retrogressive steps. Shock them too much and they'll close down and it will take twice as long to get the requisite changes.
The Andris Principle of political change : There is an inverse ratio between the dramatic nature of a change and the time to get it accepted.
by
Andris (4 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 531 comments)
on Monday, November 5, 2007 at 1:14:32 AM
She is a Trilateralist...an arm of the Bilderbergs..which means she backs the power elite...There is plenty of info on both on the web along with the Council on Foreign Relations along with other groups. All are rotton to the core. They control our government. Rumsfeld is a Bilderberg. Does that give you a clue? I have many links. You Tube also has info. Check their videos.
Tired of it as I am? Then contact your House Reps and insist they co- sponsor HR 333 for impeachment of Cheney. Kucinich is bringing it to the floor. Only has 20 co-sponsors so far.
by
Rae (0 articles, 1 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 218 comments)
on Sunday, November 4, 2007 at 8:02:28 PM
Andrew, I have followed your writings for sometime now and I know you are a human being committed to Truth and decency. But you give way too much credit to the so-called opposition party now in Washington. Have you noticed how these collegial Senators manage to take turns casting votes that are clearly enabling the continued slide into fascism so that others in the Party can look like they still represent the people. It's a damned farce, and I, for one, have had it with thinking that there is a dime's worth of difference between them. I am a moral person and I refuse to squander one more vote on the lesser of two evils. Evil is as evil does, and with a few notable exceptions, they are all complicit in perpetuating this sham of a representative democracy. We have a governemnt of, for and by the corporations, not the people, and the sooner we face this, the sooner we can start real grass roots efforts to take our governement back. It can be done, and it will be done. The only question is when it will be done. But I will not give one minute of my time, not one speck of my energy, and not one red cent to the Democratic Party. As awful as Republican rule is, at least they don't pretend they give a flying f--k about the American people, most especially the poorest and weakest among us. And neither party cares enough about the Constitution to defend it, even in the most cursory way. They have sold their souls and the idea of Life Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness to the highest bidder and will continue until we find a way to replace them all. Feinstein and Schumer are just this issue's "face" of a party that lost its soul a long time ago.
by
Char Stellamaris (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 35 comments)
on Sunday, November 4, 2007 at 9:10:19 PM
I must admit, Starofthesea, to having had, myself, some notion kindred to yours about the meaning of some of the action in Congress.
We're all of us, on the outside looking in, attempting to find some interpretive framework to explain what we see. Since politics is almost always about people making decisions on the basis of goals, and values, and interests that are not articulated openly to the public, it leaves a lot of room for divergent interpretations.
My own working hypothesis is different from yours, because I think that if you were right things would play out differently.
For example, if the Dems were as eager as the Bushites for us to head on down the fascist road, I wouldn't think that they'd have conducted the kind of confirmation hearings with Mukasey that they did. Do you imagine, for example, that that's how the Republicans would have done it?
Do you imagine that the Bushites were eager to have torture made the main subject of the news again for a couple of weeks? Would people trying to abet a fascist takeover of America have worked to elicit from this nominee his various statements about presidential powers, including the power to disobey constitutional laws? Do you think that it helps the fascist cause for several of these senators --according to your hypothesis, all in on the plot-- to make the statements that they have about the troubling erosion of the rule of law?
I'm disappointed that they end up caving. But I still am glad that these issues were brought forward into the public limelight, resulting in hard-hitting editorials in the New York Times and elsewhere, further sounding the alarm about this lawless presidency.
And I don't think that this quite inadequate but still not worthless performance by the Dems on the Judiciary COmmittee is compatible with the idea that they're all complicit in the fascist program.
Which is not to say that I feel I understand well at all what Feinstein and Shumer were thinking.
But --to make a more general point-- it is not my belief that the impetus toward fascism is widespread in America. I don't think many of the American people really want it. And I don't think that there's much impetus there at all from the Democrats. And beyond that, I'd bet that most Republican office-holders would rather their party were more like it used to be and less like what this brown-shirted Bushite bunch has made it.
What troubles me is not the thought that there is so much real, "I'm for it" support for this fascism. It's that there's not more impassioned and committed opposition to it.
Anyway, that's how I interpret the dramas that are being played out on the public stage, for us all to see and to puzzle over.
I do not claim to certainties.
by
Andrew Bard Schmookler (314 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 146 comments)
on Sunday, November 4, 2007 at 10:33:14 PM
Andrew, I have followed your writings for sometime now and I know you are a human being committed to Truth and decency. But you give way too much credit to the so-called opposition party now in Washington. Have you noticed how these collegial Senators manage to take turns casting votes that are clearly enabling the continued slide into fascism so that others in the Party can look like they still represent the people. It's a damned farce, and I, for one, have had it with thinking that there is a dime's worth of difference between them. I am a moral person and I refuse to squander one more vote on the lesser of two evils. Evil is as evil does, and with a few notable exceptions, they are all complicit in perpetuating this sham of a representative democracy. We have a governemnt of, for and by the corporations, not the people, and the sooner we face this, the sooner we can start real grass roots efforts to take our governement back. It can be done, and it will be done. The only question is when it will be done. But I will not give one minute of my time, not one speck of my energy, and not one red cent to the Democratic Party. As awful as Republican rule is, at least they don't pretend they give a flying f--k about the American people, most especially the poorest and weakest among us. And neither party cares enough about the Constitution to defend it, even in the most cursory way. They have sold their souls and the idea of Life Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness to the highest bidder and will continue until we find a way to replace them all. Feinstein and Schumer are just this issue's "face" of a party that lost its soul a long time ago.
by
Char Stellamaris (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 35 comments)
on Sunday, November 4, 2007 at 9:10:32 PM
As I read some where that the choice was between M or some acting flunky who would be totally disposeable and could turn into a series of actings untill the time.
Bush is clearly going to ignore the Congress and do what he wants under proclaimation. The public just didn't give Dems enough votes to overturn the Pres. veto et al.
I still advocate a shadow play by passing punative legislation for the new Pres to sign. If worded correctly they might even spook some of the avartitious beneficiaries of his reign seeking immunity for testimoney
Rumsfell and co will probably get a presidential pardon against future prosecution on the last day when the truth won't matter.
by
Andris (4 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 531 comments)
on Monday, November 5, 2007 at 1:34:13 AM
Yes, it probably is true that Mukasey is better than whoever else would be running the AG's office if he were rejected.
But as I said in the opening of this thread, the issue is larger than the AG's office per se.
The issue here is the larger issue that's at the core of what faces America at this moment in history, in the face of this lawless presidency: it's the defense of the Constitution and the rule of law.
by
Andrew Bard Schmookler (314 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 146 comments)
on Monday, November 5, 2007 at 10:35:57 AM
12 comments
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