engagement

I've done my best to try and promote the basic thrust of Gore's speech in venues that are fairly hostile to critique of the President. I have been invited to contribute at NoEndButVictory.com and at Dean's World. My purpose is to catalyze debate, not promote Democrats or Gore for president or any political aim. At Dean's World, I included the entire transcript in a hidden-text block, and highlighted the statement,

I call upon Democratic and Republican members of Congress today to uphold your oath of office and defend the Constitution. Stop going along to get along. Start acting like the independent and co-equal branch of government you're supposed to be.

Over at NEBV, I highlighted this longer excerpt:

Don’t misunderstand me: the threat of additional terror strikes is all too real and their concerted efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction does create a real imperative to exercise the powers of the Executive Branch with swiftness and agility. Moreover, there is in fact an inherent power that is conferred by the Constitution to the President to take unilateral action to protect the nation from a sudden and immediate threat, but 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 years that produces a serious imbalance in the relationship between the executive and the other two branches of government.

There is a final reason to worry that we may be experiencing something more than just another cycle of overreach and regret. This Administration has come to power in the thrall of a legal theory that aims to convince us that this excessive concentration of presidential authority is exactly what our Constitution intended.

This legal theory, which its proponents call the theory of the unitary executive but which is more accurately described as the unilateral executive, threatens to expand the president’s powers until the contours of the constitution that the Framers actually gave us become obliterated beyond all recognition. Under this theory, the President’s authority when acting as Commander-in-Chief or when making foreign policy cannot be reviewed by the judiciary or checked by Congress. President Bush has pushed the implications of this idea to its maximum by continually stressing his role as Commander-in-Chief, invoking it has frequently as he can, conflating it with his other roles, domestic and foreign. When added to the idea that we have entered a perpetual state of war, the implications of this theory stretch quite literally as far into the future as we can imagine.

This effort to rework America’s carefully balanced constitutional design into a lopsided structure dominated by an all powerful Executive Branch with a subservient Congress and judiciary is-ironically-accompanied by an effort by the same administration to rework America’s foreign policy from one that is based primarily on U.S. moral authority into one that is based on a misguided and self-defeating effort to establish dominance in the world.

I hope that there are some who will see these excerpts and be moved to consider the broader issue, which transcends partisan politics. The Constitution is a genuinely Purple Politics issue, and has united left and right under the Liberty Coalition to present Gore's address. A unified response is needed.

UPDATE: The post at NoEndButVictory was deleted. I have reposted the article here.

Tags: Al Gore, Constitution of the United States, Purple Politics