He said Congress had become “structurally unrecognizable” and “now operates as if it were entirely subservient to the executive branch.” There are no oversight hearings, and appropriations bills are passed without serious consideration, often without even being available for members of Congress to read before voting on them. The rubber-stamp character of Congress was exemplified in the NSA spying case, with a handful of congressional leaders informed under conditions where they agreed to say or do nothing. “Democrats as well as Republicans in the Congress must share the blame for not taking sufficient action to protest and seek to prevent what they consider a grossly unconstitutional program,” he said.
Gore concluded by condemning what he described as an administration effort to spread fear and intimidate the public into accepting the massive erosion of democratic rights. He called for the appointment of a special counsel to “pursue the criminal issues raised by the warrantless wiretapping of Americans by the president.”
There are three aspects of Gore’s speech which are critical from the standpoint of a socialist analysis of the deepening political crisis in the United States. First, his speech was directed entirely to the ruling elite. Gore was making an appeal, not to the American people as a whole, but to the Washington political and media establishment of which he is a longtime member. After making his indictment of the Bush administration—quite powerfully, by the standards of official American political debate—he declined an offer from PBS to appear on the Jim Lehrer news program, and issued only a perfunctory two-paragraph response to the predictable diatribes against him by White House spokesmen and the right-wing press.
Second, Gore refused to characterize the material interests and motives which impel the Bush administration’s power-grab, referring only to “mistakes” and actions which were “misguided.” He criticized the decision to invade Iraq, but never mentioned the word “oil.” The previous week, Bush gave a particularly vicious speech attacking opponents of the Iraq war in which he declared that criticism of the war was permissible only so long as charges of a “war for oil” were excluded from the debate. Despite the harshness of his criticism of Bush January 16, Gore tacitly accepted this restriction.
In a similar vein, Gore avoided any examination of the social conditions within the United States—above all, the enormous growth of social inequality—which is the underlying motor force of the Bush administration’s attacks on democratic rights. It is impossible to maintain democratic forms in a society so sharply polarized between enormous wealth in the hands of a tiny elite—less than one percent of the population—and the vast majority struggling for their economic survival.
As a bourgeois politician who defends the profit system that is responsible for this vast social polarization, Gore is incapable of raising this central issue. Instead, he sought to make an appeal to a section of the ultra-right, warning that an all-powerful Bush administration might be succeeded by a Democratic president who would exercise similarly sweeping powers. His appearance was co-sponsored by several anti-tax and libertarian groups and Gore paid tribute, at the beginning of his remarks, to the co-organizer of the event, former Georgia congressman Bob Barr, who was one of the Republican managers in the impeachment and trial of President Bill Clinton.
Gore was at pains to reassure his fellow members of the ruling elite that despite his well-grounded criticisms of the Bush administration, he was equally committed to the defense of the interests of American imperialism. One key passage of his speech declared his agreement that the threat of terrorism “does indeed create a real imperative to exercise the powers of the executive branch with swiftness and agility.”
Gore added, “there is in fact an inherent power conferred by the Constitution to any president to take unilateral action when necessary to protect the nation from a sudden and immediate threat. And it is simply not possible to precisely define in legalistic terms exactly when that power is appropriate and when it is not. But the existence of that inherent power cannot be used to justify a gross and excessive power-grab lasting for many years and producing a serious imbalance in the relationship between the executive and the other two branches of government.”
In other words, Gore condemns Bush for an “excessive power-grab lasting for many years,” holding out the prospect that a power-grab of lesser size and shorter duration would be more manageable and less costly in terms of discrediting the political system which has served corporate interests and the American ruling class for so long.
Thirdly, the response to Gore’s speech in the political establishment underscores what the WSWS has maintained ever since the stolen election of 2000: there exists no significant section of the ruling elite that is prepared to make a serious issue of the defense of democratic rights.
The Bush administration itself and its open lackeys in the right-wing press have portrayed Gore either as an embittered loser of 2000—although he actually won the popular vote and would have taken office but for the unconstitutional intervention of the Supreme Court—or as a lunatic who ignores the obvious necessities of the global war on terror.
From the Democratic Party and its media allies, the response has generally been to ignore the speech altogether. Here the lead was given by the New York Times, the most cowardly and unprincipled of the bourgeois “opponents” of the Bush administration, which did not even dignify the speech with a separate article. The Times relegated it to a passing mention in a story, buried in its New York regional coverage, on the White House reaction to Hillary Clinton’s comparison of the Republican-run House of Representatives to a southern plantation.
While some daily newspapers published editorials supporting Gore’s criticisms, the speech was dropped as a media topic within a few days. It went virtually unmentioned in the network television interview programs the following Sunday, on which Democratic senators Joseph Lieberman, Richard Durbin, Charles Schumer and John Kerry all appeared.
Only Kerry was even asked about Gore’s attack, and his response demonstrated the intellectual incoherence and inability to take a firm position which made him a caricature as a presidential candidate in 2004. Kerry said the current program of presidentially-authorized spying by the National Security Agency (NSA) was illegal, then rejected the suggestion that Congress should cut off funding for it, saying instead that Congress would readily approve some form of NSA domestic spying if the administration sought legislative backing.
Gore concluded by condemning what he described as an administration effort to spread fear and intimidate the public into accepting the massive erosion of democratic rights. He called for the appointment of a special counsel to “pursue the criminal issues raised by the warrantless wiretapping of Americans by the president.”
There are three aspects of Gore’s speech which are critical from the standpoint of a socialist analysis of the deepening political crisis in the United States. First, his speech was directed entirely to the ruling elite. Gore was making an appeal, not to the American people as a whole, but to the Washington political and media establishment of which he is a longtime member. After making his indictment of the Bush administration—quite powerfully, by the standards of official American political debate—he declined an offer from PBS to appear on the Jim Lehrer news program, and issued only a perfunctory two-paragraph response to the predictable diatribes against him by White House spokesmen and the right-wing press.
Second, Gore refused to characterize the material interests and motives which impel the Bush administration’s power-grab, referring only to “mistakes” and actions which were “misguided.” He criticized the decision to invade Iraq, but never mentioned the word “oil.” The previous week, Bush gave a particularly vicious speech attacking opponents of the Iraq war in which he declared that criticism of the war was permissible only so long as charges of a “war for oil” were excluded from the debate. Despite the harshness of his criticism of Bush January 16, Gore tacitly accepted this restriction.
In a similar vein, Gore avoided any examination of the social conditions within the United States—above all, the enormous growth of social inequality—which is the underlying motor force of the Bush administration’s attacks on democratic rights. It is impossible to maintain democratic forms in a society so sharply polarized between enormous wealth in the hands of a tiny elite—less than one percent of the population—and the vast majority struggling for their economic survival.
As a bourgeois politician who defends the profit system that is responsible for this vast social polarization, Gore is incapable of raising this central issue. Instead, he sought to make an appeal to a section of the ultra-right, warning that an all-powerful Bush administration might be succeeded by a Democratic president who would exercise similarly sweeping powers. His appearance was co-sponsored by several anti-tax and libertarian groups and Gore paid tribute, at the beginning of his remarks, to the co-organizer of the event, former Georgia congressman Bob Barr, who was one of the Republican managers in the impeachment and trial of President Bill Clinton.
Gore was at pains to reassure his fellow members of the ruling elite that despite his well-grounded criticisms of the Bush administration, he was equally committed to the defense of the interests of American imperialism. One key passage of his speech declared his agreement that the threat of terrorism “does indeed create a real imperative to exercise the powers of the executive branch with swiftness and agility.”
Gore added, “there is in fact an inherent power conferred by the Constitution to any president to take unilateral action when necessary to protect the nation from a sudden and immediate threat. And it is simply not possible to precisely define in legalistic terms exactly when that power is appropriate and when it is not. But the existence of that inherent power cannot be used to justify a gross and excessive power-grab lasting for many years and producing a serious imbalance in the relationship between the executive and the other two branches of government.”
In other words, Gore condemns Bush for an “excessive power-grab lasting for many years,” holding out the prospect that a power-grab of lesser size and shorter duration would be more manageable and less costly in terms of discrediting the political system which has served corporate interests and the American ruling class for so long.
Thirdly, the response to Gore’s speech in the political establishment underscores what the WSWS has maintained ever since the stolen election of 2000: there exists no significant section of the ruling elite that is prepared to make a serious issue of the defense of democratic rights.
The Bush administration itself and its open lackeys in the right-wing press have portrayed Gore either as an embittered loser of 2000—although he actually won the popular vote and would have taken office but for the unconstitutional intervention of the Supreme Court—or as a lunatic who ignores the obvious necessities of the global war on terror.
From the Democratic Party and its media allies, the response has generally been to ignore the speech altogether. Here the lead was given by the New York Times, the most cowardly and unprincipled of the bourgeois “opponents” of the Bush administration, which did not even dignify the speech with a separate article. The Times relegated it to a passing mention in a story, buried in its New York regional coverage, on the White House reaction to Hillary Clinton’s comparison of the Republican-run House of Representatives to a southern plantation.
While some daily newspapers published editorials supporting Gore’s criticisms, the speech was dropped as a media topic within a few days. It went virtually unmentioned in the network television interview programs the following Sunday, on which Democratic senators Joseph Lieberman, Richard Durbin, Charles Schumer and John Kerry all appeared.
Only Kerry was even asked about Gore’s attack, and his response demonstrated the intellectual incoherence and inability to take a firm position which made him a caricature as a presidential candidate in 2004. Kerry said the current program of presidentially-authorized spying by the National Security Agency (NSA) was illegal, then rejected the suggestion that Congress should cut off funding for it, saying instead that Congress would readily approve some form of NSA domestic spying if the administration sought legislative backing.
