What do our leaders promise when they take the oath of office? Is is to defend America against evil-doers? What does the oath say about loyalty to the president? Does it involve the Bible? Did Keith Ellison change the oath when he used the Koran instead? The people running our government and claiming all but unlimited powers don't want you to know what they actually swore to when they took office.

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It's oath-inducing enough when officeholders break their oaths of office. But there can be no greater insolence than an officeholder who denies knowledge of what his oath was.

The President...shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.

--U.S. Constitution

I do solemnly swear that I will...to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

--Richard Nixon, 1968 and 1972

Well, when the president does it that means that it is not illegal.

--Richard Nixon, 1977

Nixon's long, painful decent from the Oval Office was marked by the constant assertions of The President's Men that their loyalty to him overrode all other considerations, including legality, and that they considered this the height of honor. Interestingly, their oath of office is to uphold the Constitution and doesn't even mention the president, while laws were already on the books that required of them outright disobedience to illegal orders. "Loyalty to the president" isn't mentioned anywhere, although the fact that the laws allow the president to fire members of his government at will certainly explains where it comes from.

In our own time, the Nixon Doctrine of presidential lawlessness is being used far more vigorously than Tricky Dick ever would have dared. From signing statements to illegal search and seizure to cruel and unusual punishment to forced self-incrimination, Bush's "anti-terrorism" campaign has ripped out so many parts of the Constitution he swore to preserve, they should probably just issue an abridged edition to save paper.

In the latest in a long train of usurpations, Bush has ordered staffers Harriet Miers, Joshua Bolten, and Sara Taylor to refuse to answer questions and provide documents demanded by Congress. Such orders from more traditional presidents would only be exposed after a lengthy investigation, but Bush has come right out and done it in the open. According to the dark hints of James Comey, whatever they're hiding is so extreme that that guardian angel of civil liberties, John Ashcroft himself, was ready to resign in 2004 if they didn't stop it, along with Comey and other top Justice Department officials.

The greatest prophet of the sixteenth century might actually not have been Nostradamus but Shakespeare:

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office...

What Hamlet is trying to account for with his great speech, in his princely, flowery language, is why everybody doesn't just off themselves, given how cruddy everything is. The political trends of the past few years lend renewed significance to this question--especially when it comes to the oath of office.

Consider Keith Ellison, the freshman Democratic congressman from Minnesota who was trashed late last year after he announced he'd be taking his oath on the Koran. His Republican colleague Virgil Goode, who serves a district in an area of Virginia that has been a bastion of slavery, Jim Crow, and white paranoia since the nation began, warned against more Muslims coming into the country and electing more Muslims to Congress. Goode also commented, "I do not subscribe to using the Koran in any way." In an op-ed, with admirably unintentional irony, he called on Americans to "save Judeo-Christian values" to avoid "leaving ourselves vulnerable to infiltration by those who want to mold the United States into the image of their religion."

Bush refused to criticize Goode's overt anti-Muslim bigotry--"no judgments have been made," Bush spokesman Dana Perino explained. But Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) took it upon himself to play the good cop for the GOP, distancing himself from Goode's remarks:

"Why would you swear allegiance to a document outside your faith? ...I embrace religious diversity. I welcome this new member of Congress. I'm glad he's swearing allegiance to a document that is consistent with his faith."

Unfortunately, what Graham says here is both a deliberate deceit and a clever political double-game to gain support from the prejudiced while simultaneously conciliating the unprejudiced. Smart politicians know that you don't have to denounce your opponent to score points on him. All you have to do is draw attention to anything that might cost him support from the public, while at the same time saying, "As a high-minded person, I have nothing against this." That is exactly what Graham is doing here, knowing perfectly well that many Americans are far more openly anti-Muslim than Bush or even Goode.

The deceit, on the other hand, comes down to a preposition. Lindsey Graham, who's taken the oath of office five times within the halls of Congress, knows perfectly well that Keith Ellison did NOT "swear allegiance to" the Koran. Nor did Graham, nor Goode, nor anyone else, swear allegiance to the Bible. The Constitution does not permit anyone to take office in the United States that way. Here is the actual Constitutional provision concerning swearing in, nothing omitted:

The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.

In other words:

1) You must swear allegiance to Constitution itself.

2) The one thing you don't do is swear allegiance to a religion.

The Framers put that in because religious "tests" used to be required to swear in members of the British Parliament, not letting them take their seats unless they swore to something that would contradict their consciences if they were not Christian, or not Protestant, or not Anglican, depending on how far back in history you go. Virgil Goodes have a long lineage.

In this country, you can swear your oath ON the Bible, ON the Koran, ON the Boy Scout Honor Code, or on anything else that ensures you're not mentally crossing your fingers. But you only swear TO the Constitution.

So when Graham says, "I'm glad [Ellison]'s swearing allegiance to a document that is consistent with his faith," this is a deliberate deception, designed to scare voters who fear that people with Islamic allegiances are out to get us. By pretending that Ellison took a different oath than the other members of Congress, Graham is trying to associate disloyalty with the Democratic party.

It's part of a systematic effort within the Republican party to make Americans forget what the oath of office really is. After all, the so-called War on Terror in the name of which Bush junks everyone's rights has never been a war on terrorists in general. I didn't see Bush go after the Columbian government, despite all the labor leaders they've been killing; and Saddam Hussein wasn't attacked for terrorism. No, the "War on Terror" is a war on Muslims who oppose the United States. By making that the new polarity in the world, questions of the Constitution fade away. Constitutionalism is pre-9/11 thinking--it's just a piece of paper, after all.

As long as Americans are convinced that the proper allegiance of office-holders is to Judeo-Christianity and the national security state, our secular Constitution really doesn't matter. Electees can go on with the formality of the Constitutional oath--you won't see it unless you O.D. on CNN, and you'll never see them uphold it. Few Americans will realize the illegality of the state they expect to save them from evil. In the New World Order, the polarity will not be between Constitution and lawlessness, but Christians and Jews versus Muslims, hawks versus traitors, with civil liberties as merely a fifth column.

The Republicans have been pushing that thinking ever since 9/11--and now they're upping the ante. Because if enough Americans remember what their oath of office really is, Bolton, Miers, and quite possibly their higher-ups could be headed straight for the slammer.

Authors Bio:

Michael Lubin served on the first democratically elected governing board in the history of KPFA, the nation's oldest listener-sponsored radio station. There, he was a founding member of the pro-democracy listeners' movement People's Radio. Although a Ph.D. student in History of Culture at the University of Chicago, he perversely insists on living in California.  He is known variously as Nuisance Man, Caveman, Lubejob, the Dialectrician, and "Hey, you bozo with the long hair!"  He blogs, or something like that, at newsince.com.  He also highbrows at dialectrics.com and fictions at thenoondaysun.com.