Mukasey And The Constitution

Andrew Sullivan takes down Attorney General nominee Mukasey for his evasive, dishonest Senate testimony and proceeds to identify the defining issue of American domestic governance in the early 21^st Century:

 

 An attorney general who believes a president has a permanent right to ignore the rule of law because peacetime is now wartime for ever, is an attorney-general defending the rule of one man over the rule of law. If I were a Senator, (heh, indeed) I’d vote no. This is the faultline of our time. If we are redefining war as a permanent state of being, and redefining presidential authority to give him/her extra-legal and extra-constitutional power to what s/he wants anywhere in the world, including the United States and to its citizenry, then American liberty is in extreme peril. To approve an attorney general who does not dissent from this position is a terrible precedent. 

Don’t people see that this is what Cheney is doing? He is setting precedent after precedent for totalist, secret executive power. And with each precedent for unchecked, uncontrollable executive power – including the power to detain and torture within the United States – the America we have known is being surrendered. This is the other war – a constitutional war at home against American liberty and the Constitution – as dangerous in a different way as Islamism. One attacks our freedom from the outside; the other hollows out our freedom from within. The fight against both is the calling of the time.

  As he has noted in the past, the Bush Administration did not initiate this war on the Constitution; it was the Clinton Administration who took us back down the long, sad, twisted road of executive overreach.   With a looming Clinton Administration (or Bush administration in the person of one Rudy Giuliani) in the wings, it is time to reflect on what we as a country are doing to our most trusted institution; the Constitution.  IMHO, the Constitution and its forefather of principles (The Declaration of Independence) is the backbone of this nation.  Without this most incredible of intellectual human endeavors, we are little better than the next country. The withering assaults on it from the left and the right over the past few decades have been disturbing enough, but what has unfolded over the last decade is most disheartening of all. 

According to those engaging in this behavior, we’re a nation at war, so such abuses are necessary.  Yet they also insist we’re at war indefinitely, in a decades-long enterprise.  Instead of offering realistic, plausible alternatives or improvements to the Constitution we have, they instead specialize in backdoor manuevers and end-arounds when not in the glare of the media or critics, and smugly declare their dedication to the nation’s security when they are caught red-handed and use it as a shield of honor for their disgraceful behavior.