The Courage of the President



President George Walker Bush is either a coward or a criminal. If the President believes in the ideals of the Constitution and is failing to live up to them, he is a coward. If the President does not believe in the ideals of the Constitution, then he is violating his oath of office and deserves impeachment for breech of the public trust.

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As President Bush told Matt Lauer recently, "My job is to protect the American people." I beg to differ: the President's job is bigger and more important than simply protecting the American people, though that endeavor is a part of his job.

The Presidential Oath of Office is a simple one. Every President since George Washington has recited the following sentence with his hand on a bible in front of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court as a condition of taking office: "I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

This means that the most important part of the President's job is to quite literally, "Preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution," not the people. This is because the Constitution, the ideas contained therein, and the freedoms it guarantees transcend an individual life and are indeed more important than an individual life.

Apparently, no one told Dubya.

With the passage and signing of the recent detainee bill (full text), President Bush has been granted the right to establish a military tribunal that will have the power to determine without judicial or legislative oversight (otherwise known as public accountability) who among us is an "unlawful combatant" and who is not. Then they will be able to detain anyone of us for as long as the war on terror exists without charging us with a crime and without telling the courts that we've been arrested. At that point they will also have the power to torture us during any and all interrogations.

Our right to defend ourselves in court has been acknowledged since 1215 when King John signed the Magna Charta. It was codified by the English Parliament in 1679 with the passage of the Habeas Corpus Act. And now for the first time in 327 years, a legislative body in America, the Congress of the United States of America, has signed away that basic right at the specific request of President George Walker Bush.

Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Hancock, Alexander Hamilton, and every veteran of the American Revolution are collectively rolling over in their graves. These men --and their wives, mothers, and daughters-- lived under more direct threat to life and liberty than we do now. Still, they fought to maintain individual rights rather than throw them away on the fleeting promise of security that cannot be guaranteed.

Without habeas corpus the right to free speech, the right to assemble, the right to petition government, the right to practice your religion, the right to unwarranted search and seizure, the right to a speedy trial, the right to not incriminate yourself, the right to bear arms, and the right to privacy are all pointless and moot. They cannot be protected without habeas corpus.

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And so I denounce President George Walker Bush as either a coward or a criminal. Either way, he is unfit for office. Either way he will lose the war on terror. Either way he is an outright danger to America.

Daniel

Posted: Fri - October 6, 2006 at 05:46 PM          

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