When
we Americans first began, our biggest danger was clearly
in view: we knew from the bitter experience with King
George III that the most serious threat to democracy
is usually the accumulation of too much power in the
hands of an Executive, whether he be a King or a president.
Our ingrained American distrust of concentrated power
has very little to do with the character or persona
of the individual who wields that power. It is the
power itself that must be constrained, checked, dispersed
and carefully balanced, in order to ensure the survival
of freedom. In addition, our founders taught us that
public fear is the most dangerous enemy of democracy
because under the right circumstances it can trigger
the temptation of those who govern themselves to surrender
that power to someone who promises strength and offers
safety, security and freedom from fear.
It is an extraordinary blessing to live in a nation
so carefully designed to protect individual liberty
and safeguard self-governance and free communication.
But if George Washington could see the current state
of his generation's handiwork and assess the quality
of our generation's stewardship at the beginning of
this twenty-first century, what do you suppose he
would think about the proposition that our current
president claims the unilateral right to arrest and
imprison American citizens indefinitely without giving
them the right to see a lawyer or inform their families
of their whereabouts, and without the necessity of
even charging them with any crime. All that is necessary,
according to our new president is that he - the president
- label any citizen an "unlawful enemy combatant,"
and that will be sufficient to justify taking away
that citizen's liberty - even for the rest of his
life, if the president so chooses. And there is no
appeal.
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What would Thomas Jefferson think of the curious
and discredited argument from our Justice Department
that the president may authorize what plainly amounts
to the torture of prisoners - and that any law or
treaty, which attempts to constrain his treatment
of prisoners in time of war is itself a violation
of the constitution our founders put together.
What would Benjamin Franklin think of President
Bush's assertion that he has the inherent power
- even without a declaration of war by the Congress
- to launch an invasion of any nation on Earth,
at any time he chooses, for any reason he wishes,
even if that nation poses no imminent threat to
the United States.
How long would it take James Madison to dispose
of our current President's recent claim, in Department
of Justice legal opinions, that he is no longer
subject to the rule of law so long as he is acting
in his role as Commander in Chief.
I think it is safe to say that our founders would
be genuinely concerned about these recent developments
in American democracy and that they would feel that
we are now facing a clear and present danger that
has the potential to threaten the future of the
American experiment.
Shouldn't we be equally concerned? And shouldn't
we ask ourselves how we have come to this point?
Even though we are now attuned to orange alerts
and the potential for terrorist attacks, our founders
would almost certainly caution us that the biggest
threat to the future of the America we love is still
the endemic challenge that democracies have always
faced whenever they have appeared in history - a
challenge rooted in the inherent difficulty of self
governance and the vulnerability to fear that is
part of human nature. Again, specifically, the biggest
threat to America is that we Americans will acquiesce
in the slow and steady accumulation of too much
power in the hands of one person.
Having painstakingly created the intricate design
of America, our founders knew intimately both its
strengths and weaknesses, and during their debates
they not only identified the accumulation of power
in the hands of the executive as the long-term threat
which they considered to be the most serious, but
they also worried aloud about one specific scenario
in which this threat might become particularly potent
- that is, when war transformed America's president
into our commander in chief, they worried that his
suddenly increased power might somehow spill over
its normal constitutional boundaries and upset the
delicate checks and balances they deemed so crucial
to the maintenance of liberty.
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