Turning back the clock on democracy
By
Mike Krauss
Bucks County Courier Times
Americans are generally
taught that the Declaration of Independence sprung whole from the mind of
Thomas Jefferson, to launch America to greatness. But in fact that great work
was preceded or accompanied by 90 like minded state and local “declarations of
independence.”
As Bill Bigelow of the
Zinn Education Project put it, “Jefferson was not a lonely genius conjuring his
notions from the ether; he was part of a nationwide political upheaval.”
That upheaval was a long
time coming, as Jefferson and all the “Founders” and “Framers” of the United
States and its Constitution well knew.
The American Revolution
was a step forward in more than 500 years of struggle, beginning in England in
1252 with the Magna Carta, which set the first limits on the old feudal order
of arbitrary, aristocratic privilege and “royal” executive authority.
The language of the
Declaration and the Bill of Rights in the U.S. Constitution echo earlier
democratic writers and an English Bill of Rights promulgated in 1689, which the
Founders and Framers of our democracy also knew well.
The protection against
“cruel and unusual punishment” was written into American law because they knew
the savage punishments common in English law up to the decades of the
colonization of the New World.
The right of the accused
in American courts to a speedy, public trial at which evidence must be
presented and can be contested was written into our law precisely because the
Founders and Framers well knew the secret courts of English “justice” and the
prisons in which those arrested by royal command could languish for years, or
have their confessions “extracted” (read torture), to be condemned and executed
on trumped up evidence or a mere assertion of guilt.
The Declaration and the
Constitution followed from the long struggle to establish democracy and the
rule of law against feudal privilege and power.
That history is still
being written.
The Member of Congress
for the district in which this newspaper is published championed two bills, the
Enforce the Law Act and the Faithful Execution of the Law Act. The point of
these bills is that the president is deciding what parts of legislation the
Congress enacts he will choose to enforce.
To some extent, these
bills are part of the GOP’s never ending hissy fit over Obamacare. That’s
unfortunate, because what the Congressman rightly calls “executive over-reach”
is a real threat to our democracy and the rule of law.
Under our Constitution,
the representatives of the people in Congress are empowered by the people to
make the laws. The president, the executive, is charged to “faithfully execute”
his office; that is, to carry out those laws.
This arrangement is not
accidental. As the American jurist and diplomat, Craig S. Barnes notes in his
seminal book, Democracy at the Crossroads, the intended purpose was to insure
that in America, “The chief executive [the president] would have no royal
prerogative to act on his own…Law would come from the compromise fashioned in
the assembly [Congress] draw from the people. The [president’s] oath of office
would be an explicit and solemn remedy for the severe grievances against which
the colonists’ ancestors had been struggling for more than five hundred years.”
But beginning with
Richard Nixon and his chief of staff, Dick Cheney, American presidents have
been embarked on a power grab, and now issue “Signing Statements” to accompany
the laws Congress has passed, indicating which parts of the law they will and
will not enforce.
On whose authority does
the president assert this extraordinary power? His own.
Hail, Caesar and thank
you, Your Majesty.
The congressman is
rightly concerned. This subversion of the Constitution has been fully embraced
by George Bush and Barack Obama, and turns back the clock on democracy and the
rule of law.
But the Congressman’s
bills do not need to be enacted. The Constitution provides a remedy for a
president who forswears the great oath to “faithfully execute” his office and
“preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” The
remedy is impeachment.
But that remedy will not
be employed, and nor will the congressman’s bills become law, because this
Congress has almost no support among the American people, who know full well
that only the one percent of the one percent who fund elections now have a
voice there.
The congressman is
shadow boxing.
The corruption of our
elections, the captured Congress they produce and an increasingly autocratic
presidency are pulling our hard won democracy back into the undemocratic
injustice of the old, feudal order which the first American patriots threw off.
