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None Dare Call It Hypothetical
 In
Washington, D.C., a local talk-radio host poses a provocative
question: What if international terrorists were plotting a Super 9/11 that
would kill not just 3,000 Americans — mere child’s play for
these nuts — but might wipe 30,000, 300,000, or even “a city
of 3,000,000 off the face of the planet”? Would the president then be
justified in a few technically illegal wiretaps to detect them in
time?  The
question practically answers itself.
Come to think of it, what if a
bunch of raghead Islamofascist suicide bombers got hold of a bomb that
would destroy the entire world, blasting the planet into four or five huge
chunks? And suppose the details of their plot were known only to a few
long-haired, reefer-crazed, unpatriotic hippies who hated our way of life and
weren’t talking. Wouldn’t the president, in that case, be
duty-bound to use interrogation techniques frowned on by the ACLU?
As Abraham Lincoln said, it may be
necessary to sacrifice one provision of the Constitution in order to preserve
the whole of it. The problem of saving the Union becomes even more urgent
when you face the chance that various sections of the Union may wind up in
different parts of the solar system. (But there’s always a silver
lining: The media would have to stop whining about global warming.)
In the unhappy event that our
Mother Earth were violently sundered because President Bush didn’t
have time to get court authorization to rough up a few hippies — for
want of a nail, a horseshoe was lost, et cetera — a few of the
survivors, stranded on the wrong chunk, would still have to live under a
Republican administration, listening to talk radio. And no doubt the president
would continue to insist that it was still quite feasible to bring democracy to
the Muslim world, even if this now required an interplanetary mission. He
might also point out, with some justification, that withdrawing U.S. troops
from Iraq, as the cut-and-run Democrats want to do, had just become an
even greater logistical difficulty than before.
Or, to think outside the box for a
moment, consider an even more chilling possibility: What if we had an
arrogant moron in the White House who neither understood nor cared what
the laws and the Constitution said, with his party controlling both houses of
Congress? I admit this is a far-fetched example, but these are not normal
times. Just try to imagine it. We can’t be too careful.
![[Breaker quote for None Dare Call It Hypothetical: A moron in the White House, and other nightmare scenarios]](2005breakers/051220.gif) Such
are
the stakes in the current debate over whether President Bush has acted
ultra vires — beyond his legal powers, even in violation of the
Constitution he swore to uphold — in ordering surveillance for what is
called national security. His defenders appeal to the president’s
“implied powers,” the right-wing answer to liberalism’s
“penumbras formed by emanations” as a device for infinitely
elastic interpretations of plain words, words their authors mistakenly
assumed anyone could understand, even an ordinary Yale graduate.
When the U.S. Constitution was
written, Yale and Harvard were still little Christian colleges, not yet big
universities; Benjamin Franklin was puttering with electricity, which nobody
foresaw would transform home life, communication, and everything else; air
travel was hardly even a dream; modern weapons of mass murder
weren’t even imagined; and the first version of King
Kong hadn’t yet been filmed.
How could this quaint document
have relevance to our world today? A fair question. Without treating it as
Holy Writ, we can recognize that it embodied a sound principle: the division of
power. Like an even older and quainter document, the Magna Carta, its
distant ancestor, it recognized the danger of concentrating arbitrary power
in the hands of too few men, especially one man. The narrow specifics differ,
which is why each generation’s passions sound quaint to the next; but
the principle is always the same.
In a word, the Constitution is
anti-monarchical. This is why it provides for things like elections, which we
still have, and impeachments, which, though essential protections, are all too
rare. Elections without the real threat of impeachment invite the abuse of
power.
Monarchism — which might
be called political idolatry or hero-worship — is a perennial temptation,
even under the forms of a republic, as Bush and his supporters illustrate,
with their bizarre claims, demands, and excuses for concentrated power.
And the temptation is most acute in time of war. This isn’t just an
occasional case of “history repeating itself”; it’s the
never-ending story of all politics.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2005 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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