Barack Obama and John McCain have now squared off in two major debates. The debate transcripts show that they have discussed a number of issues, focusing on the current financial crisis and the Iraq war as the most urgent matters requiring national attention. And those are undeniably important issues.
But a simple search reveals that a rather important word has not been uttered once by either candidate in the course of either debate.
That word is "Constitution."
The trail of destruction left by Bush and Cheney is long, and the dire consequences of the most laissez-faire, most unilateralist, most pro-privatization administration in our time are clear for all but the most hidebound reactionary ideologues to see. But as we all know, we have also seen in the past eight years a concerted assault on the very idea of constitutional government, launched by a president who once shouted to members of his own party (a party willing to travel quite far down the road to authoritarian rule) that the Constitution is just a "goddamned piece of paper."
We've seen a vice president make the jaw-dropping argument that he occupies a brand new fourth branch of government that is, apparently, above any pusillanimous notion of checks and balances. We've seen a president who is pefectly willing to ignore habeas corpus and the privacy protections in the Fourth Amendment, and a Congress that was not willing or able to stand up to him (see the Military Commissions Act, immunity for telecoms, and the FISA capitulation). And just this past week, NSA whistleblowers have revealed that absolute spying power led to--drum roll, please!--absolute corruption. One of the many brutal ironies of the Bush years is that a president who was rushed into office by a Supreme Court eager to avoid a "constitutional crisis" has governed as though the supreme law of the land existed in a minor advisory capacity, one that could be relegated to some dusty corner of the federal bureaucracy.
The Constitution has come up only in the vice presidential debates. Joe Biden referred to the Constitution in arguing for the equal protection of gay couples, and Biden and Palin exchaged barbs over the proper role of the vice president (with Palin memorably stating that there is some "flexibility" with regard to the vp's powers).
Yes, we need to fix the financial system, and I look forward to hearing more on that question. But it would be nice in the final debate between Obama and McCain to see just a moment devoted to this pesky little question: do we as Americans really believe in our own Constitution when it can be brazenly and repeatedly violated with impunity?