For Whom the Bell Tolls? Could be your wake-up call, Mr. President

I commend Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut for his courageous speech on the Senate floor yesterday concerning the revamped Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), spelling out his reasons for opposing the bill. Rather than limiting the basis for his objections to the telecom immunity provision of the bill, Senator Dodd listed the long "chain of abuses" (language remarkably similar to the "train of abuses" phrase employed by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence) of the Bush Administration. The speech is worth reading in its reasonably long entirety, linked here. Senator Dodd conducts a survey course in the unconstitutional actions of the Bush Presidency since September 11, 2001. It's the sort of speech, in its tone and and radical language (from the Latin, radix, of the root) I used to hear on a daily basis from the steps of Sproul Hall in Berkeley a few decades back. Live long enough, I suppose, and you'll see everything happen, including radical speeches from Senators who look as if they would be comfortable on the back nine at the Westchester Country Club.

A surprising trend seems to be underway these days. I would have surmised that as the Bush Presidency wound down, the American commoners and Beltway insiders alike would have been so relieved to see him leave that a spirit of reconciliation and letting bygones-be-bygones would have become the ruling zeitgeist. This does not seem to be what's happening. Rather, the criticism of Bush, particularly in Congress, has grown increasingly shrill and, for want of a better word, more fundamental. Repesentative Dennis Kucinich's 35 Articles of Impeachment are a further case in point. These are an extremely detailed list of charging allegations against virtually every aspect of Bush's unconstitutional, extra-constitutional and felonious activities while he's been in office.

Bush's entire defense to such charges, boiled down to its essence, rests on a very slender reed. Bush, who is not a deep or nuanced thinker, was seduced by the blandishments of a group of executive power extremists who convinced him that Article II of the Constitution in a "time of war" confers almost limitless power on the President. This was a dangerous concept to sell to a man as emotionally insecure as Bush, who overcompensates for his sense of inadequacy with a megalomaniacal assertion of self. So: 9/11 provided the war, and the first Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) gave him his charter to ignore the Constitution and any federal statutes which were seen by his bellicose advisers as contrary to free use of his power.

The theory has never been used successfully in court. One way or another the concept that the United States is a government of laws and not of men has been confirmed by all cases which have considered the issue. Bush relied too much on the counsel of intellectual lightweights like Alberto Gonzales in going down this path. When Gonzales attempted to justify all of the FISA violations on the basis of the AUMF, he was laughed out of the hearing room, and eventually out of Bush's administration. Bush's other mistake was listening to the extreme views of ideologues such as David Addington, Cheney's Chief of Staff, who is responsible for outlandish claims such as the Vice Presidency's exclusion from the Executive Branch. You add them up - Gonzales arguing that habeas corpus is not a right guaranteed by the Constitution, the free-floating Vice Presidency, that certain Arabs are not human beings for Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, the signing statements which selectively ignore Congressional enactments that don't comport with the SuperSized Presidency -- and an unmistakable picture forms of an Executive Branch which has gone completely out of control.

It's an ominous sign for Bush that the chorus is swelling, not diminishing. I would be very nervous in his situation. James Hansen, the climate scientist who at one time had his communiques edited by a Bushie corporate lawyer with no background in atmospheric science, testified to Congress and wrote an Op-Ed in which he suggested that trials for "crimes against humanity" might be appropriate for those who knowingly stood in the way of remedial action on climate change. He mentioned the CEO of Exxon, by specific name, but the principle obviously has broader application. This is Bush's Achilles Heel, ultimately; his presidency is confined to a certain finite period (mercifully), but the downstream effects of many of his actions will clearly extend well beyond January, 2009. The American people are going to be reminded of Bush next year, each and every day, by reports of continuing casualties in Iraq, by the crushing burden of the national debt, by the declining dollar, by the skyrocketing cost of fuel as the country sinks deeper into recession. And there will be no Bush Administration around for message control. Many of the secret proceedings and communications will be divulged, and the courts will be clogged with habeas corpus petitions from Guantanamo prisoners detailing their treatment.

Maybe there's something to the idea that Bush's third term will be twenty to life.