I won't be celebrating the 4th of July Saturday. Not even a little. After nearly 10 years of low-key Independence Days when I principally tried to forget for a day how Bush/Cheney was eviscerating one of the greatest political documents of all time and betraying the great sacrifices that led to it, I had hoped that when Bush was gone, I could once again look forward to the time that America would abandon the anti-Constitutional, autocratic track we've been going down since 9/11 gave Republicans the excuse they'd been looking for to rule with fear and return to its democratic roots.
Well, Bush is gone and a black, Democratic president is in office with a Democratic majority in Congress after campaigns that promised "change" and I don't see a safer Constitution. Instead, President Obama goes on television and gives a speech in which he basically promises to make illegal, unConstitutional laws legal. He doesn't mention just how he's going to pull off this feat in illogic, and meanwhile his Justice Dept - on his orders, can't blame Bush for this - goes right on with the same Bush policies Obama said on the campaign trail were "unacceptable".
Move after move after move, Obama confirms Bush/Cheney's "unitary president" theory.
In little-noticed confirmation testimony recently, Obama nominees endorsed continuing the C.I.A.’s program of transferring prisoners to other countries without legal rights, and indefinitely detaining terrorism suspects without trials even if they were arrested far from a war zone.
The administration has also embraced the Bush legal team’s arguments that a lawsuit by former C.I.A. detainees should be shut down based on the “state secrets” doctrine. It has also left the door open to resuming military commission trials.
And earlier this month, after a British court cited pressure by the United States in declining to release information about the alleged torture of a detainee in American custody, the Obama administration issued a statement thanking the British government “for its continued commitment to protect sensitive national security information.”
Some time ago I wrote that no matter who the next Democratic president was (at the time it looked like Hillary), there was no way they were going to let loose of the new power Bush/Cheney had appropriated, that only once in American history had a president voluntarily refused extra-Constitutional powers that had been offered to him, and that was George Washington. I was hoping I was wrong about that and would see Obama rise above the obvious temptations for the sake of the country. Instead, if anything, he has done more to make them acceptable than Bush.
As they move toward completing a review of their options for dealing with the detainees, Obama administration officials insist that there is a fundamental difference between Mr. Bush’s approach and theirs. While Mr. Bush claimed to wield sweeping powers as commander in chief that allowed him to bypass legal constraints when fighting terrorism, they say, Mr. Obama respects checks and balances by relying on — and obeying — Congressional statutes.
“While the administration is considering a series of options, a range of options, none relies on legal theories that we have the inherent authority to detain people,” Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, said this week in response to questions about the preventive detention report. “And this will not be pursued in that manner.”
But Mr. Obama’s critics say that whether statutory authorization exists for his counterterrorism policies is just a legalistic point. The core problem with Mr. Bush’s approach, they argue, was that it trammeled individual rights. And they say Mr. Obama’s policies have not changed that.
Glenn Greenwald sums it up in an interview with Charlie Savage (author of two of the pieces linked above).
In any case, Jack Balkin, a Yale Law School professor, said Mr. Obama’s ratification of the basic outlines of the surveillance and detention policies he inherited would reverberate for generations. By bestowing bipartisan acceptance on them, Mr. Balkin said, Mr. Obama is consolidating them as entrenched features of government.
"What we are watching," Mr. Balkin said, "is a liberal, centrist, Democratic version of the construction of these same governing practices."
That was the point former Bush DOJ lawyer Jack Goldsmith made when arguing last month that Obama is actually strengthening (rather than "changing") the Bush/Cheney approach to Terrorism even more effectively than Bush did by entrenching those policies in law and causing unprincipled Democrats to switch from pretending to oppose them to supporting them, thus transforming them into bipartisan dogma.
IOW, the America I grew up in and believed in and championed to its enemies and those who didn't understand it, that America is officially dead. We now torture, start wars for oil or political power, defend a secret prison system, lock up 13 year-olds as "terrorists", spy on our own citizens, ignore habeus corpus whenever it's inconvenient, maintain illegal incarceration at Gitmo of prisoners even the Army says are mostly innocent, maintain extraordinary rendition, maintain the state secrets policy Obama campaigned against, and so on and so on.
Not much to celebrate there. The Constitution is now just an old piece of paper the president/dictator/king can dump over the side without consequences and without Congressional approval, much less a constitutional convention. Since the Constitution is the legal and moral foundation of the country, its jettisoning effectively makes us less democratic than, say, Honduras.
So no, I won't be watching any parades or fireworks. I'll be reading the Federalist Papers and wondering what happened to all that integrity.
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