After an overlong absence, I'm feeling compelled to knock on the doors of your collective consciousness today. The reasons for my delinquency and the events of the past many months I will leave for another post, upcoming. Today, there are more pressing matters.
To wit...
As many of you are no doubt aware, there is a battle royal for the soul of America going on in the Senate even as I write.
For those unacquainted with the details, here they are:
In a last ditch attempt to save themselves from electoral losses and a Democratic congress with subpoena power after the November elections, the Republican Senate, with the explicit support of the Bush Administration, is trying - and largely succeeding - to ram through a last minute bill that will permit torture, retroactively pardon those who have committed it, inoculate the Administration against what are almost certainly violations of American law (some impeachable), redefine American obligations under the Geneva Convention into near meaninglessnes, gut the 900 year old legal and constitutional foundation of habeus corpus, and invest in the President the sole right to determine whether American law should apply to individuals - including American citizens. Including you.
In brief, it is a bill that will redefine the American soul and forever weaken the moral and legal foundations on which this country was constructed. It is an assault on the very idea of America.
It is a damning loss of innocence, one that is all the more heart-breaking because it is being committed consciously - by a Congress in which perhaps only 10% of its members understand what the law actually does or does not permit. Changes to the bill to accommodate the objections of Republican Senators McCain, Graham and Warner have in the end been watered down and now amount to mere window-dressing. Congress, including its "principled" moderates, is pretending to see no evil and hear no evil, closing its eyes and ears to the evil it is about to speak.
But this does not change the fact that those who represent us are about to authorize the President of the United States - like the leaders of Libya, Syria, China, and the former Soviet Union - to torture. At his will and at his discretion. With this bill, the nation of laws gives way to the nation of men. Or rather, to a nation of one man - George Bush. His judgment is to be our only recourse.
"Trust us" does not pass muster as a democratic means of government. And given the long and deceptive record of the men and women now in power, it doesn't even pass the laugh test.
The passage of this bill will be a monumental act. And yet it has been undertaken in a matter of days, with a rushed debate, so that the president can have something to sign while pictures are taken and Republicans can have something to bludgeon Democrats with for the next 4 weeks.
Moderate Republicans, like Arlen Specter, understand that the law is unconstitutional. In the end it may not stand, though Justices Roberts and Alito have been put on the bench precisely to uphold these tilts in power toward the executive. But relying on the Supreme Court to strike it down does not change the fact that two branches of America's government - those that officially represent the people, those who speak for us - will have sanctioned this redefinition of the American character, the American idea, and the American soul.
Barring a filibuster, today may be the day when the meaning of America was redefined into something with which none of us should feel comfortable or safe. For anyone with a sense of law or history or precedent, the implications are deeply disturbing. It's a subtle and insidious change - which is why my comments may appear dramatic. But the actions of the Congress on this day represent no less dramatic a slide downwards on the slippery slope towards a future few of us would envision or desire.
According to an editorial in today's NY Times:
"
Americans of the future won't remember the pragmatic arguments for caving in to the administration. They'll know that in 2006, Congress passed a tyrannical law that will be ranked with the low points in American democracy, our generation's version of the Alien and Sedition Acts."
It is huge.
That is why statements like the one I am linking to below are vital at this moment. They ensure that, when historians write the history of these radical times in the decades to come, the Congressional Record will speak of dissent, of outrage, and of the political expediency that damns these people and will forever damn them in the eyes of the right-minded, the sensible, and the truly patriotic. They have turned back the clock two and a half centuries and done King George's work for him. In fact, they have gone back even further and done King John's as well.
While I have been ambivalent about her in the past, the woman whose words I give you has won me over today. She now has my vote if she chooses to run in 2008. In fact, I may acquire citizenship just so that I can give her that small thanks on election day. Her's is a heroic statement at a perilous time. And more to the point, it is blazingly, gloriously, tragically true.
By way of Andrew Sullivan:
Andrew Sullivan | The Daily Dish: The Goldwater Girl Imagine what two more years without accountability will look like. It is the responsibility of all of us now to see, to listen, and to think. And to vote. As though our souls depended on it.
I write this to register that I had my eyes and ears open today. And while I felt somewhat powerless as I watched this tragedy unfold in the distance, I did have the power to see, to speak, and to object.
And to hope.
