The founders of this nation well understood that a government based on such then (and still now) radical concept as the sovereignty of the people, rather than kings or priesthoods, was a fragile notion. For that reason Benjamin Franklin when asked whether the constitutional convention had come up with a monarchy or a republic famously replied, “a republic if you can keep it.”
For over two centuries we’ve managed to “keep it”. Often as US institutions and presidencies have failed the constitution, some countervailing power, be it the courts, the press or the citizenry, has so far stepped up, as the founders hoped, to check and balance their abuses.
The radically authoritarian Bush-Cheney regime of past five years, however, has stretched the system of checks and balances to the breaking point, and given new salience to Franklin’s question of whether we can keep a republic worth the name. For unlike their predecessors in corruption this cabal barely feels the need to hide its constitution trashing, instead flouting them with a sense of both entitlement and impunity, whether it’s willfully ignoring the Geneva convention and US laws in authorizing torture, launching fraudulent wars, spying on millions of citizens without warrant and who knows what else. Not without reason. For the institutions the founders counted on to prevent or punish such outrages have instead aided and abetted them, a servile press, a corrupt Supreme court, and perhaps above all the current congress which as author Gore Vidal observed, often seems a reincarnation of the decadent Roman senate, which said to the emperor Tiberius “Any law you want us to pass we shall do so automatically.”
Consequently America in 2006 is all too eerily familiar to the Banana Republics we’ve always smugly and arrogantly assumed could never happen here. If the Bush-Cheney administration and its rubber stamp congress haven’t yet succeeded in actually suspending the constitution they are holding it in suspended animation.
In this context the November election is critical not only for the promise of a change in domestic and foreign policy priorities it offers (though it surely is that) but, even more importantly, to re-assert the principle of checks and balances and sovereignty of the people. Though we in Vermont suffer from this descent into political lunacy along with everyone else, we’ve also served as a great dissident counter-example of a politics rooted in deeper American traditions of grass-roots democracy, civil liberties and social justice. This November more than ever before the people we elect to Congress and the Senate can be, need to be, catalysts of that spirit nationally.
Accomplishing this will require not only formulating and advancing progressive positions on specific issues but committing the next congress to exposing, confronting and holding to account the many crimes against the constitution and the republic. The means at our disposal to do that is to launch impeachment investigations against the Bush administration.
Democratic congressional candidate Peter Welch is by all indications, smart, committed and progressive. He’s advancing good ideas (long overdue in Washington DC ) on health care, education and the environment. I intend to vote for him. But I’m disappointed that nowhere on his web site or, as far as I know, in public statements come out forthrightly and forcefully for launching impeachment investigations into the many high crimes and misdemeanors of Bush, Cheney, and Co, something over three dozen current members of Congress have already done by endorsing Rep. John Conyers’ Bill H 635. If this is a case of his playing it safe for fear of being too contentious and offending the mythical “middle of the road” voter (a shibboleth of political “pros” which has done more than anything to prevent the emergence of a coherent Democratic opposition over the past five years) it doesn’t bode well for (I hope) soon to be Congressman Welch’s potential to transcend Beltway politics as usual. And nothing less is good enough.
However unfashionable such a stance may be within the culture of the Beltway it remains the only way to insure that a true record of the level of their corruption, deceit and incompetence is provided for future generations. We’re well beyond the point where progressive politicians can afford to be polite, respectable, and by failure to confront, ineffectual. As a supporter I’m thus urging Mr. Welch to both come out in support of and commit himself to help lead the fight for bill H635 initiating a long overdue impeachment investigation.
Phil Leggiere, Wilmington