Can US Democracy Survive Another Year Of Bush?

The Christmas-New Year break was the calm before the Consitutional storm. Now it's crunch time, folks.

But how do you impress upon the US public the full seriousness of the crisis facing the USA right now?

Anything Jonathan Schell writes is worth a read. His latest piece in the Nation makes things about as plain as you can get:

When the New York Times revealed that George W. Bush had ordered the National Security Agency to wiretap the foreign calls of American citizens without seeking court permission, as is indisputably required by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), passed by Congress in 1978, he faced a decision. Would he deny the practice, or would he admit it? ...

Bush's choice marks a watershed in the evolution of his Administration. Previously when it was caught engaging in disgraceful, illegal or merely mistaken or incompetent behavior, he would simply deny it. ... But in the wiretapping matter, he has so far exhibited no such vacillation. Secret law-breaking has been supplanted by brazen law-breaking. The difference is critical. If abuses of power are kept secret, there is still the possibility that, when exposed, they will be stopped. But if they are exposed and still permitted to continue, then every remedy has failed, and the abuse is permanently ratified. In this case, what will be ratified is a presidency that has risen above the law.

The danger is not abstract or merely symbolic. Bush's abuses of presidential power are the most extensive in American history...

There is a name for a system of government that wages aggressive war, deceives its citizens, violates their rights, abuses power and breaks the law, rejects judicial and legislative checks on itself, claims power without limit, tortures prisoners and acts in secret. It is dictatorship.

The Administration of George W. Bush is not a dictatorship, but it does manifest the characteristics of one in embryonic form. Until recently, these were developing and growing in the twilight world of secrecy. Even within the executive branch itself, Bush seemed to govern outside the normally constituted channels of the Cabinet... As in many Communist states, a highly centralized party, in this case the Republican Party, was beginning to forge a parallel apparatus at the heart of government, a semi-hidden state-within-a-state, by which the real decisions were made.

With Bush's defense of his wiretapping, the hidden state has stepped into the open. The deeper challenge Bush has thrown down, therefore, is whether the country wants to embrace the new form of government he is creating by executive fiat or to continue with the old constitutional form...

If Congress accepts his usurpation of its legislative power, they will be no Congress and [it] might as well stop meeting. Either the President must uphold the laws of the United States, which are Congress's laws, or he must leave office.

Geov Parrish reaches a similar conclusion in his latest article, The Constitutional crises of 2006:

Congress must reject Samuel Alito, and Congress, if it is (in the words the Bush White House once reserved for the U.N.) "to remain relevant," must impeach George Bush and Dick Cheney. In both cases, citizen outrage will be required to force a corrupt and reluctant Congress to act. And in November, citizens must use the leverage our once-relevant Constitution gives us, and we must sweep the whole rotten Congressional carcass from office -- conclusively enough that no Republican dirty tricks or Diebold-style tampering can alter the results. Regardless of party, we must replace lawmakers, at the local, state, and especially federal level, with candidates who are truly responsive and accountable to the ordinary people who elect them.

It's either that, or by 2007 we will be living in a de facto dictatorship. It's our choice.

In an aside, Parrish's article poses an interesting question: were Bush's illegal NSA wire-taps used for GOP gain during the 2004 election?

He also considers the likely implications of Jack Abramoff turning whistle-blower:

Abramoff knows how Capitol Hill works and where many of the skeletons are buried. If he chooses to, he could blow the lid off of Congress. Regardless of how many Congressional indictments are handed down in 2006 (and the answer is not "zero"), the Abramoff scandals are likely to tar both Republicans and Democrats and beg the question, during an election year, of whether any politician can be trusted any longer to care about the needs and desires of his or her constituents.

But what if Abramoff chooses to selectively blow the lid on Democrat sleaze only?

Molly Ivins seems to think today's version of US Democracy Lite is not up to the looming crisis:

Either the president of the United States is going to have to understand and admit he has done something very wrong, or he will have to be impeached. The first time this happened, the institutional response was magnificent. The courts, the press, the Congress all functioned superbly. Anyone think we're up to that again? Then whom do we blame when we lose the republic?

Ivins ties the latest NSA wire-tapping back to the TIA scandal and the broader "data mining" debate:

You may recall in 2002 it was revealed that the Pentagon had started a giant data-mining program called Total Information Awareness (TIA), intended to search through vast databases "to increase information coverage by an order of magnitude."

From credit cards to vet reports, Big Brother would be watching us. This dandy program was under the control of Adm. John Poindexter, convicted of five felonies during Iran-Contra, all overturned on a technicality. This administration really knows where to go for good help -- it ought to bring back Brownie.

Everybody decided that TIA was a terrible idea, and the program was theoretically shut down. As often happens with this administration, it turned out they just changed the name and made the program less visible.

And (still at Working For Change), Bill Berkowitz suspects that Bush & Co are about to distract public attention by pulling yet another fat, juicy story out of their media empire hat. Arianna Huffington also sees a familiar pattern at work:

It's the Bush administration's political spin on those five stages of grief, which move from denial to anger, through bargaining and depression to, finally, acceptance.

The president's current posturing is a Kubler-Ross twofer, combining both denial and anger in one handy stage-straddling step...

The president has only just begun to feel the political grief on this one.