Sure enough, the pre-election polls indicated a likely Democratic victory in the House. But the Senate? That victory was especially sweet, for being unexpected.
Those of us who are convinced that the previous three elections were stolen by means of paperless, "direct record electronic" (DRE) voting machines and compilers, feared that the secret DRE codes would once again frustrate the public will and keep both houses in control of the GOP.
DRE critics such as Brad Friedman ( of "BradBlog") and Mark Crispin Miller, warned us to expect still more e-vote rigging, but further suggested that "the fix" could be over-ridden by a "tsunami" of protest votes against the GOP and Bushism. Turns out, they were right. The Republican software geniuses at Diebold, ES&S, etc. underestimated the size of the wave of public indignation. Just three or four percent vote shifting in Virginia, Montana and Missouri seemed sufficient to keep those seats, and thus the Senate, in GOP control. They were proven to be wrong. The House was a much more difficult assignment: too many individual seats to "fix."
My guess is that in a completely honest election, the Democrats would have won as many as fifty seats in the House, instead of the twenty-nine that (at last count) they have gained. The Democrats would have won Virginia, Montana and Missouri, not "by a whisker," but by comfortable margins, and Senate seats in Tennessee and Arizona might also have been added to the Democratic total.
But never mind all that. The Democrats now have control of both houses of the Congress, and with it the opportunity to halt the Bushevik insurgency in its tracks and perhaps reverse it.
If the Democrats and their liberal and progressive supporters treat the election as a battle won in an ongoing war, they may eventually prevail. If they come to believe that with this election, they have won the war and thus quit the fight, they will lose it. For we must never forget that the Busheviks and their supporters still have the White House, the courts, and the mainstream media in their corner.
The Democrats, for their part, have the Congress and, perhaps most significantly, the accompanying power of oversight and investigation. And the past election has demonstrated that there are limits to the ability of the mainstream media to influence public opinion and political support. Most significantly, the Busheviks are concealing crimes against the state and the people that are so onerous that their exposure and the convictions that might follow could relegate the Republicans to several decades of minority status.
If I were to place my bets on the Busheviks (plus the courts and MSM) vs. a determined, disciplined and tactically astute Democratic Congress, my bet would be with the Congress and the Democrats. But quite frankly, I have serious doubts that we will have that kind of a Congress and Democratic party. After all, when the Democrats briefly re-took control of the Senate in May 2001, they didn't exactly come roaring out of the starting gate. Instead, the following October, a majority of the Senate Democrats voted for Bush's Iraq War Resolution, and all but one Democratic Senator (Russ Feingold) voted for the USA Patriot Act.
Speaker-designate Nancy Pelosi has announced that the primary objectives of the new Congress will be a raising of the minimum wage, health care reform, and tax reform. These are all commendable goals. But if these social reforms are to endure and not be undone by a GOP resurgence in 2008, some more fundamental issues must be addressed along with an exposure and prosecution of the crimes of the past six years.
I would like to discuss three of these over-arching issues: restoration of the Constitution, the assurance of electoral integrity, and oversight and impeachment.
Restoration of the U.S. Constitution.
All federal officers and members of Congress take an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. There can be little doubt that Bush and his supporters in the administration and the Congress have violated that oath. Read the Bill of Rights (the first ten amendments to the Constitution), and you will find that as many as six of those ten articles have been directly and specifically violated by executive orders of the President or by acts of the GOP Congress. In addition, the Military Commissions Act has selectively abolished Habeas Corpus, which is specified in the Constitution (Article One, Section Nine), and Bush, with his "signing statements," has explicitly violated the Constitutional requirement that The President "shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed" (Article Two, Section 3).
In effect, the Constitution has been nullified by the Bush administration and its collaborators in the Congress. It must be restored promptly and decisively by resolutions stating that the Congress recognizes the Constitution, and not the will of the President, to be the supreme law of the land. And the Congress must immediately pass legislation that nullifies all sections of the Patriot Act, the Military Commissions Act, etc., and all executive orders that violate the Constitution.
No doubt, Bush will veto such legislation, and Senate Republicans will probably prevent an override of the vetoes. But if so, there will be victory in the defeats: the American people then know, who is, and who is not, attempting "to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." Then the fight will move on to the Federal Courts, and to the voters in forthcoming elections.
So long as Bush retains his extraordinary and unconstitutional powers and his claim to arbitrarily ignore acts of Congress, anything else that the Congress might attempt may prove futile – if the President, at his own discretion, chooses to make it so. Thus restoration of the Constitution must be the highest priority of the 110th Congress.
Dr. Ernest Partridge is a consultant, writer and lecturer in the field of Environmental Ethics and Public Policy. Partridge has taught philosophy at the University of California, and in Utah, Colorado and Wisconsin. He publishes the website, "The Online Gadfly" (www.igc.org/gadfly) and co-edits the progressive website, "The Crisis Papers" (www.crisispapers.org). His book in progress, "Conscience of a Progressive," can be seen at www.igc.org/gadfly/progressive/^toc.htm .
The DC Dems are hell-bent on "staying the course" of non-impeachment.
The Number 1 rationale invoked to defend their self-imposed "off the table" edict is that investigations will lead to impeachment.
When Martin Luther King said "we must come to see that human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability" he could have been talking directly to Members of Congress who are escaping their personal responsibility to impeach by convincing themselves that impeachment will inevitably result if they simply carry on with oversight and investigation, business as usual.
Bush and Cheney are committing their war crimes and conducting their criminal domestic surveillance program in plain sight. Americans are torturing other human beings NOW. The case for impeachment is clear, compelling, and complete. It has been so for years.
Elected bodies, good government organizations, and countless individual citizens have examined the evidence and judged Bush and Cheney to be an intolerable our constitutional democracy. They are demanding impeachment, NOW.
When members of Congress refuse to introduce articles of impeachment for the crimes that are "hiding in plain sight," they effectively exonerate Bush and Cheney of those crimes and demonstrate contempt for the concerned citizens who are demanding action.
Dr. Partridge is far from alone in his claim that introducing articles of impeachment would be premature. But like the countless other investigation advocates, he does not tell us WHAT an investigation could possibly uncover that would be more egregious than the high crimes already proven in the public record.
The Constitution is under attack. Members of Congress are sworn to defend. They are armed and ready. They have a duty to formally accuse (draft Articles of Impeachment) and make the case. Each day that they delay, they are responsible for the harm that the Bush-Cheney White House inflicts on the nation and the world.
The Congressional oath to uphold the Constitution is not an oath to win -- it is an oath to fight -- to "support and defend." Fear of failure cannot excuse a Member of Congress from doing what duty demands.
The price of delay could be unimaginable
Time Is NOT on our side.
The price of delay could be unimaginable.
Any day we could see another terrorist attack; Bush could declare war on Iran or Syria or North Korea or Venezuela or even Haiti; or some completely unforeseen event could make it impossible to rescue our national soul for a long time to come.
Even when we move full steam ahead, we can be thwarted by events.
On September 10, 2001, there were many signs that sanity was returning. The number who believed Florida was stolen had passed 50%. Bush's approval was continuing the steady downward slide that started the day he was inaugurated. A coalition led by Democrats.com that included the National Lawyers Guild and Vincent Bugliosi was about to announce their "fall offensive" -- a campaign that that included the effort to see Scalia et al. impeached for Bush v. Gore.
Bush's claims to any semblance of legitimacy were crumbling fast.
Then the sun came up on 9/11/2001. In the weeks that followed, the countless people who were horrified by the stolen election and Bush's incredible abuses were silenced in a nation that had seemingly gone mad.
Sanity is once again returning, but we must recognize how fragile the moment is.
by
Patty Keeshan (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 5 comments)
on Thursday, December 7, 2006 at 2:43:33 AM
is the power to subpoena. Only time will tell if they will understand that their first and greatest task is to restore the democracy weakened by these neocons. I have much scepticism.
by
ardee D. (6 articles, 4 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 2377 comments)
on Thursday, December 7, 2006 at 7:18:52 AM
2 comments
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