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The Lawless State
 Sometimes
the deepest changes in a
political system sneak in almost unnoticed. So it has been in the United
States, which has quietly shifted from being a decentralized federal republic
 to
being a centralized democracy.
Moreover,
the actual power has shifted from the legislative branch to the executive.
This would have startled the men who created that republic in reaction
against the British monarchy, which they regarded as tyrannical because it
concentrated so much power in one man’s hands. Their faces would
blanch at President Bush’s casual claim that he is “the
decider.”
The big
decisions, under the U.S. Constitution, were supposed to be made by the
Congress, and “faithfully executed” by the president. Thus
Congress declared war after Pearl Harbor and Franklin D. Roosevelt then
(and only then) assumed the powers of commander in chief of the armed
forces.
But a few
years later, Harry Truman took the country to war in Korea without
Congress’s authorization. Few seemed to notice that Truman had
usurped a monarchical prerogative. That is, he had acted as a dictator.
Neither Woodrow Wilson nor Roosevelt, both of whom had greatly expanded
the executive branch, had dared go that far.
Liberals are
now rightly accusing Bush of grabbing power, but unfortunately nobody is
listening. After all, we’re used to overweening presidents by now,
thanks in large part to those same liberals who have celebrated the
“strong” presidencies of Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman, and others.
It was only during the Nixon years that they discovered the dangers of the
“imperial presidency.”
During
Roosevelt’s four terms, conservatives had realized the same dangers
of what they called “Caesarism,” and to them we owe the
Twenty-Second Amendment, limiting a president to two terms. But as liberal
Democrats dominated Congress for decades, they began to see the
presidency as their only hope of gaining power and forgot their principles in
order to support Nixon, Reagan, and the first Bush.
Today,
alleged conservatives favor the current Bush’s
“big-government conservatism,” together with all the
unprecedented warmaking and national security powers he asserts. Both
parties oppose the old constitutional limits on executive power, except when
they find some of those limits politically convenient for the nonce.
Conservatives are apt to be outraged when the media reveal how far Bush
has gone in transgressing private matters we used to assume were safe
from government spying.
![[Breaker quote for The Lawless State: What America has become]](2006breakers/060711.gif) It’s
no use asking where the Constitution authorizes Bush’s security measures. Instead of
vetoing laws he doesn’t like, he issues “signing
statements” explaining how he will interpret them, thus substituting
his own loopholes for proper vetoes.
Liberals
have been paving the way for a president like this for a long time, and
they’ve finally gotten the “conservative” they deserve.
They’ve done their best to make the Constitution so malleable as to
be meaningless, without stopping to think that two can play that game. Now
it’s the Republicans’ turn.
The U.S.
Supreme Court has finally shamed this administration into making a show of
humanity to prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay, but the liberal majority
didn’t really make much of a legal case for applying the Geneva
Conventions to those prisoners.
Bush’s
acquiescence was as arbitrary as his former rigor had
been. He must have decided that the political cost and worldwide notoriety
were just too much, if his own conscience didn’t rebuke him for his
indiscriminate harshness.
Even if you
accept the dubious premises of the War on Terror, you may be uneasy at the
indefinite detention of men who may be innocent on any reckoning. Do we
really want to punish people for the bad luck of being swept in a dragnet?
Don’t we have enough enemies without that?
On even the
strictest reading, the Constitution may, and does, permit — or at least
doesn’t forbid — all sorts of things that are wrong or ill-advised
on other grounds, such as the carpet-bombing of cities in wartime. And now
that the Constitution has ceased to inhibit the government, its decisions
have to be based on those other grounds, such as “a decent respect
to the opinions of mankind.”
If the
Founding Fathers could see us now, they’d surely ask, “How on
earth did you get yourselves into this mess?” We’ve managed
to do nearly everything the Constitution was designed to prevent us from
doing.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2006 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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