Here is my rant about yesterday's legislation. I also sent this to the Chicago Sun-Times. Too long to print though.
I feel about as low as I have ever felt about our country. It helped to spill it out!
217 Years. It was a good run. That is how long the United States of America had a Constitution that meant something. It gave us, formally, our form of government - A constitutional democracy. At the time in 1789, it was unique. There were no others, but people had been thinking and formulating its concepts for centuries before that.
We, as a nation, came together and decided that we would govern ourselves because we felt that all people enjoyed certain rights. They were so important that right after the Constitution was ratified, the Bill of Rights was ratified to put those rights in print.
Our nation believed that men could not govern men; there would always be corruption and the power-hungry, so we would need laws to govern us. No person or small group was reliable, so three separate branches were needed. Each would look after the others to make sure that corruption was checked. Of these, they felt that the Legislature, Congress, should have the most power. The Executive, President, would eventually be filled by someone who was selfish in some way and needed lots of oversight. The Presidential oath makes no mention of protecting the people; it only says to `defend the Constitution'.
It was a great idea. In fact, many other countries eventually decided to try similar plans. Now there are democracies all over the world. They always looked up to us to see that it could be done.
Unfortunately, it is now over for ours. You see, today (Sept 28, 2006), our Legislature passed a law at the urging of our President that gives him unlimited, and unchecked powers. This law gives the President to remove the most basic rights from any individual, citizen or not, he so chooses. They have done away with habeas corpus!
You may say, "no, that is only for the terrorists". You would be wrong. The law gives the President the authority to name anyone as an `enemy combatant'. The person can be a citizen who has never even left America. Once he names the person as an enemy combatant, they instantly lose the right of habeas corpus.
Habeas corpus has been around for over 700 years. It is the idea that when imprisoned, you have the fundamental, human right to ask a court to review your imprisonment to determine if there is any cause to hold you. You see, the idea came about because under dictatorships and such, a king could put you imprison for any, or no, reason, and you would sit there until you died: no trial, no lawyer, no visitors, nothing. This idea said that an independent court had to review your case, not to determine guilt or innocence, but to decide if there was any evidence against you. If there was not, then you were immediately released.
Our Constitution says `habeas corpus cannot be suspended except in the case of rebellion or invasion'. It has only been suspended once during the civil war (a rebellion). It has not been suspended now, it has been eliminated.
The President has already been violating this statute. The Supreme Court said so recently. It said that those held by the United States need to be given a review by a Federal Court for the purposes of habeas corpus. This President, being the petulant child that he is, didn't like to be told what to do, so he had the rules re-written, and the sniveling cowards that are Congress went along with it.
It is bad enough that torture is now legal by the President, he now doesn't even have to tell us who he is holding or why. He could legally walk out to Pennsylvania Ave, point at anyone and then throw that person in jail for the rest of their lives without access to the courts or a lawyer. Well, so long as he just says `that person is an enemy combatant'. We would never see or hear from that person again.
Oh sure, some of you are thinking, here goes Pete off on one of his anti-Bush rants throwing in his usual exaggerations. Well, you would be wrong this time. A Republican Senator (Specter - PA) tried to add an amendment to the legislation to grant habeas corpus and it was voted down (51-48).
If you trust George W Bush to manage this in an above board manner, I would say you are quite naïve. Bush has already admittedly lied to us about several things. He said a couple years ago that the government would only wiretap with a warrant, then it came out that he knew when he said those things that he was already doing illegal wiretapping. He continues to say that things in Iraq are going well, when his own commanders go in front of Congress and testify otherwise. There are many other examples.
Even if you are still in the very small minority that still trusts this guy, what about the next President. God forbid if one was even more corrupt than this one. Maybe it will be Hillary Clinton. I certainly wouldn't have a problem with that, but would you want her to have this sort of power. I wouldn't and I like her.
We as a country like to think we are tough and strong and moral. I think we are none of those things. Tough, Strong, Moral people don't change all their basic principles when they get punched in the nose. They take a stand and fight back and show the others that their principles are what make them strong.
What does it say about us that when we are attacked, the first things we do are throw our long-standing principals out the window and do anything to just get revenge? There is no reason to torture except for revenge. We as a country probably tortured in the past, and that was wrong, but now we have passed laws that allow our President to decide torture on a case-by-case basis.
We have thrown out the idea of judicial oversight before search and seizure as in the case of wiretapping. We attack those who disagree with us as un-patriotic! We live with attacks of those wounded defending this country by those who used their family status to get out of serving.
But worst of all, we have gone back centuries to a time when it was acceptable to put people in prison forever without reason and we have codified this in our laws.
Were we always so unsure of our Constitution, that it took one attack by a bunch of thugs for us to throw it out? I guess so.
217 years. It was a hell of run, but now it is over. History, I hope, will not be very kind to our generation!