The Disappearing Congress

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.