Constitutional Crisis?
Steinfels, Margaret O'Brien
COLLOQUIUM yES, THE BUSH administration does pose a serious danger to basic liberties and constitutional democracy. Do the NRA and the ACLU agree on what that threat is? I doubt it. Each...
...Roughly speaking, the issue for the NRA is property rights, in its case the right to own guns (and for the Republican Party generally, the right to tax cuts, downsizing government, and turning back regulatory protections...
...The benign phrase "permanent campaign" masks full-time, well-funded efforts to debunk, catch out, and undermine candidates and elected officials alike...
...DISSENT / Fall 2004 n 15 COLLOQUIUM Senate candidate in Illinois withdrew after his wife's claims in their divorce papers were unsealed in a suit brought by the Chicago Tribune...
...The Court and every other institution of government—only consider the record of the Department of State, the Pentagon, and the CIA over the last three years—are now subject to reshaping for wholly partisan purposes...
...MARGARET O'BRIEN STEINFELS recently edited two volumes of American Catholics in the Public Square...
...Congress is by definition a partisan body, but even it has reached new extremes...
...So too, departments in the executive branch that are looking more and more like the wholly owned subsidiaries of Republican Party operative Karl Rove...
...The federal judiciary has come to mirror and augment this partisanship because each party when in control offers nominees who mirror its own views—and only its own views (usually on Roe v. Wade)—while obstructing the nominees of the other side...
...The Republican U.S...
...The resolution of the 2000 presidential election by judicial fiat shows one consequence of this ideological vetting of Supreme Court justices...
...Wouldn't it be comforting to think that the Democrats could restrike a balance...
...For certainly the Republicans—and this administration in particular—are the worst offenders in so much that has gone wrong...
...For this at least we should be grateful...
...Sometimes these are the result•of party "research" offices, sometimes the work of shock jocks...
...With Democrats and Republicans locked in ceaseless combat, should we be surprised that the checks and balances of our constitutional system are buckling under the siege...
...On June 28, the Supreme Court began to right the balance on matters of habeas corpus for prisoners held at Guantanamo and in the United States, showing that our system of checks and balances still functions—but just barely...
...The Congressional Budget Office, once a nonpartisan tool for looking at the costs of legislation and appropriation bills has had its rules changed to reflect the supply-side theory of tax cuts...
...Over the last two decades, the cumulative effect of ideological polarization between Democrats and Republicans has gained a powerful grip on our political system...
...Of a coming Kerry-Edwards administration, my single hope is that it will do no further damage to the body politic...
...even the mainstream media have been drawn in...
...Where is his right to privacy...
...The routine energizing of each party's base in attacks and counter-attacks, once the coin of political campaigns, is now the common currency of Washington politics...
...COLLOQUIUM yES, THE BUSH administration does pose a serious danger to basic liberties and constitutional democracy...
...The civil service experts and bureaucrats that Congress and the public depend on for factual analysis are threatened with dismissal if their "facts" thwart the Republican agenda...
...But the Democrats give no sign that they are able to resist a scorched earth strategy, only that they are less powerful and less adept at practicing it...
...that is, the more you cut taxes the more you have in revenues...
...16 n DISSENT / Fall 2004...
...As the election approaches, selective leaks and partial reports from the Republican controlled Congress are constructing a cordon sanitaire around the president and his decision to go to war against Iraq...
...Underlying the conflict between the "right" to property (and thus security) and the "right" to liberty is the degradation of politics itself and the political thinking and rhetoric that dominate the public square...
...For the ACLU, personal liberty is the rights issue, in this instance that of enemy combatants held without charges (and for the Democratic Party generally, the right to abortion, same-sex unions, and privacy...
...Each organization represents a pole in the partisan battle that successive Republican and Democratic administrations have waged over the last several decades on the definition of fundamental rights, a battle that is eroding our constitutional structures and protections...
Vol. 51 • September 2004 • No. 4
