it's on the subject
What Al Gore’s speech reveals about the state of US politics
By Patrick Martin
26 January 2006
In the ten days that have passed since the January 16 speech delivered by Al Gore in Washington charging President Bush with trampling on the Constitution in his conduct of the “war on terror,” the former vice president has been alternately vilified, ridiculed or ignored. There has been little serious discussion of his criticisms of the Bush administration, however, outside of the World Socialist Web Site. (See: “Bush administration domestic spying provokes lawsuits, calls for impeachment”)
The substance of Gore’s speech was the most sweeping indictment of the Bush administration by any significant figure within the US ruling elite since Bush took office in 2001. He not only charged that the Bush White House seeks to exercise quasi-dictatorial powers over the American people, but he painted a picture of a judicial system and a Congress which are unwilling to challenge the presidential power-grab and uphold the traditional institutions of the American constitutional system, based on the separation of powers between Congress, the White House and the courts.
Such statements from such a source have extraordinary political significance. Gore is, after all, not an accidental figure in American politics. The son of a longtime senator from Tennessee, he was in turn a congressman, senator, vice president for eight years—during which he played a central role in much of the policymaking of the Clinton administration—and then the presidential candidate of the Democratic Party in 2000. He received more than 50 million votes in that election, beating Bush by 500,000 in the popular vote.
Now this representative of the highest level of the American ruling elite declares that “America’s Constitution is in grave danger,” and that democratic values “have been placed at serious risk by the unprecedented claims of the administration to a truly breathtaking expansion of executive power.”
In the current exposure of illegal surveillance, Gore said, “What we do know about this pervasive wiretapping virtually compels the conclusion that the president of the United States has been breaking the law, repeatedly and insistently. A president who breaks the law is a threat to the very structure of our government.”
He repeatedly referred to the conviction of those who wrote the American Constitution that “they had established a government of laws and not men,” declaring that the Bush White House was seeking to reverse this, creating an all-powerful executive that could ignore the law and do as it pleased.
Gore dismissed the administration’s claim that the NSA wiretapping was an exercise of presidential war powers authorized by Congress after the September 11 terrorist attacks, pointing out that the White House had sought to have specific authority for domestic counter-terrorist actions inserted in the resolution, but congressional leaders refused. “When President Bush failed to convince Congress to give him the power he wanted when this measure was passed, he secretly assumed that power anyway, as if congressional authorization was a useless bother,” he said.
Gore warned that the Bush administration’s “disrespect for America’s Constitution ... has now brought our republic to the brink of a dangerous breach in the fabric of the Constitution.” He denounced Bush’s claims of a presidential right to imprison American citizens indefinitely, without an arrest warrant or any judicial proceeding, and without informing them of the charges against them or allowing them to contact a lawyer or their own families.
He cited the White House claim of the right to kidnap, imprison, interrogate and torture individuals seized in foreign countries and held in secret US facilities around the world. “Over 100 of these captives have reportedly died while being tortured by executive branch interrogators,” he said, noting that the vast majority of those held at the best-known such prison, Abu Ghraib, were innocent of any crimes.
“Can it be true that any president really has such powers under our Constitution?” Gore asked. “If the answer is yes, then under the theory by which these acts are committed, are there any acts that can on their face be prohibited? If the president has the inherent authority to eavesdrop on American citizens without a warrant, imprison American citizens on his own declaration, kidnap and torture, then what can’t he do?
“The dean of Yale Law School, Harold Koh, said after analyzing the executive branch’s extravagant claims of these previously unrecognized powers, and I quote Dean Koh, ‘If the president has commander-in-chief power to commit torture, he has the power to commit genocide, to sanction slavery, to promote apartheid, to license summary execution’.”
This last passage warrants underlining. Gore cites with approval the assessment—by a prominent member of the US legal establishment—that the logic of the Bush administration’s policy is to assert the right to commit atrocities on a Hitlerian scale. This is how far American capitalism has moved since the launching of Bush’s “war on terror.”
The rest of Gore’s speech was devoted to reviewing the impact of this unilateral assertion of presidential authority on the system of checks and balances between the executive, legislative and judicial branches which is the hallmark of the US constitutional system.
“As a result of this unprecedented claim of new unilateral power, the executive branch has now put our constitutional design at grave risk,” he said. “The stakes for America’s democracy are far higher than has been generally recognized. These claims must be rejected and a healthy balance of power must be restored to our republic. Otherwise, the fundamental nature of our democracy may well undergo a radical transformation.”
Gore discussed the historical implications of the Bush administration’s actions, comparing them to the arbitrary actions of the British Crown which sparked the American Revolution, as well as other episodes of attacks on democratic rights, particularly during the major wars of the 20th century, such as World War I, World War II and Vietnam. One danger in the present situation, he emphasized, was that the open-ended character of the war declared by the Bush administration could “justify arrogations of power [that] will in this case persist in near perpetuity.”
The administration has also embraced a legal theory of the “unitary executive” which claims that the president’s actions as commander-in-chief are essentially unreviewable by either Congress or the courts, another blow to the traditional framework of checks and balances.
Gore noted the declining willingness of the federal judiciary to restrain executive power, but he focused more attention on Congress, saying, “The sharp decline of Congressional power and autonomy in recent years has been almost as shocking as the efforts by the executive to attain this massive expansion of its power.”
