I knew this day was coming. I didn't think it would come quite so soon. We no longer have the luxury of time.
Though Bush has only recently publicly admitted ignoring Congress's expressed wishes, during his terms of office he has cited the unitary executive theory at least 95 times to justify such things as torture, secret prisons, imprisonment of Americans without trial, and now the warrantless monitoring of all electronic communications within the U.S.
Bush has declared, through his assertion of this theory, that he is above the law. The theory makes the completely unsupportable claim that a president does not have to enforce or abide by a law as long as
he thinks it is unconstitutional. But here's the danger: even if the theory is unsupportable, as long as Bush is in charge of enforcing the law, he will continue to act as though the theory is valid.
An honest, rational executive or jurist would subscribe to the view that has served us so very well for over 200 years: that if a president believes a statute to be unconstitutional, he has the right to challenge it and have the courts rule on its constitutionality.
But not anymore. Bush has taken the extreme view--not only supported by Judge Alito, but actually developed by him--that the president's interpretation of a law is just as important, if not more so, than the intent of Congress. Therefore, if a president feels a law is unconstitutional, he does not have to enforce or abide by it.
The unitary executive theory is nothing more than a repackaging --in fancy legal terms to give it the appearance of legitimacy-- of the American Fascists' call of the 1960s for an authoritarian government in the U.S.
The danger is imminent
This obviously flawed view, which Judge Alito refused to condemn throughout his hearings, means that the president is not only the enforcer of the law, but also the judge of it. And with Bush's liberal use of executive orders, he has already usurped much of Congress's duties as the legislator of the laws as well. All three branches of government are conveniently rolled into one. If someone can explain to me the difference between what Bush is now doing and a dictatorship, I would love to hear it. In all practical respects, Bush is already a dictator, albeit in his early stages. We must unabashedly declare him as such.
There is only one remedy for a president who embraces such a radical concept and disobeys the specific and repeated instructions of Congress: IMPEACHMENT. Anything less will be ignored. If we do not impeach now, he will rightfully conclude we do not have the courage to oppose him and he will do what all unopposed dictators do: grab more power. He will continue to ignore Congress and the courts, and he will grow in strength at an accelerated rate.
We won't suddenly wake up one morning and find ourselves completely engulfed in dictatorship. Rather, we've been traveling towards that destination in small steps, each just a little worse than the last, and each preparing us for the next. The goal is to get us to doubt the seriousness of each step along the way so that we ask "If I did not object to the last step, why should I object to this?"
Well, this is the step that must be stopped. There is no tomorrow. If we do not stop Bush now, he will have grown too strong to stop later. We are at a critical point when future historians will either congratulate us for pulling back from the brink, or point out that we missed our last opportunity to prevent the downfall of our nation.
Bush has challenged Congress by saying "If I don't like your laws I'm not going to be bound by them. What are you going to do about it?" If we learned anything from World War II, we learned that you can not appease a dictator. We must not do so now.
Judge Alito's entire career has expanded government power
But as an important prerequisite to impeachment, we must first stop Judge Alito's nomination. If ever a filibuster was justified, this is it! We must not let one of the theory's architects poison the court and bestow apparent legitimacy on Bush's power grab. Even if Bush leaves office, an Alito confirmation will condemn America to decades of radically expanded government power and intrusion into citizen's lives --while at the same time diminishing the role Congress will play in our government.
If Republicans are foolish enough to further abuse their power by outlawing a filibuster, it will play into our hands for the arguments we'll present during the State of the Union rebuttal. It will also be legal grounds for the removal of Judge Alito once sanity is restored to the leadership of our nation after the next elections.
So, after the filibuster, I join William Rivers Pitt in urging all Democratic senators and representatives to turn their back on Bush and walk out of the State of the Union address. Democrats should show at least as much courage and conviction as that shown by the law school students present during Attorney General Gonzales's address at Georgetown University.
Desperate times demand desperate measures. Unprecedented action after unprecedented action by the Democrats must drive home the point that we are not experiencing "government as usual." We must take advantage of the live television time following the State of the Union to explain the absolute urgency of the crisis at hand. After detailing Alito's extreme views, the Democratic rebuttal should make a public call for impeachment proceedings to begin immediately.
The ball will then be in the Republican's court. They can either begin impeachment proceedings, thereby guaranteeing they will continue to have a Republican president until 2008, or they can wait until after the next elections when a Democrat will assume the presidency once George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld are all impeached and convicted by a Democratic House and Senate.
Right wing propagandists assert we need a dictatorship
To close the State of the Union rebuttal, we should illustrate how right wing apologists are barely trying to hide Bush's intentions anymore. They claim we should be thankful Bush is willing to usurp all this power to protect us from the big bad terrorists. Every defense of his actions is prefaced by an appeal to our cowardice.
They're using misdirection and sleight of hand to make sure we're so afraid of a terrorist attack that we fail to ask these critical questions: Shouldn't we be much more afraid of such enormous power concentrated in the hands of a man who so strongly argues to retain the right to torture? Shouldn't we fear a man who will imprison, without trial, anyone he deems to be an enemy combatant? Is our memory of the KGB and other infamous secret police forces so faded that we somehow feel immune to their horrors?
Judge Alito's nomination is the latest step toward achieving the unthinkable. So enormous are the consequences of believing the increasingly obvious, that we naturally search for some other explanation --any other explanation--allowing us to cling to the fantasy that it can't happen here.
We can no longer remain in denial. We must look again at the evidence that's accumulated these past five years. But this time view it through the prism of recent revelations. It will then be obvious:
it can happen here.
It is happening here.
But we can stop it ... if we act NOW!