Dictators, DeLay and DeWine

Posted in Politics on Tuesday, March 14th, 2006 at at 1:20 pm by TheRanter

Every so often, some comentator claims that this country has never been so close to dictatorship and fascism as it is now, whenever that is. I remember some longtime journalist who saidas much under Bush 41, but it’s somewhat more frightening when the commentator in question is a centrist former Supreme Court Justice appointed by none other than Ronald Reagan. That is, however, what Sandra Day O’Connor said recently in a speech delivered at Georgetown University. As reported in The Guardian Unlimited, Justice O’Connor

pointed to autocracies in the developing world and former Communist countries as lessons on where interference with the judiciary might lead. “It takes a lot of degeneration before a country falls into dictatorship, but we should avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings.”

She pointed in particular to statements by Tom DeLay in the aftermath of the Terry Schiavo “right to die” case in which DeLay made veiled threats to the judiciary saying “The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behaviour.” Justice O’Connor said that threats to the independent judiciary “pose a direct threat to our constitutional freedom” and, in a reference to Senator John Cornyn, a “Bush loyalist from Texas” who made remarks that were sympathetic with the attackers who killed a judge in Atlanta and a judge’s family in Illinois, she

noted death threats against judges were on the rise and added that the situation was not helped by a senior senator’s suggestion that there might be a connection between the violence against judges and the decisions they make.

Meanwhile, according to a story in Editor and Publisher, reporters may be exempt from a a bill sponsored by Senator Mike DeWine, R-Ohio, that would make it a crime to expose surveillance activities conducted by the US government. However, as currently written, reporters could be fined up to one million dollars and receive fifteen years in prison or both for reporting on such surveillance, even if the surveillance was not classified and even if it was beign conducted by the government illegally. In other words, as currently written, reporters who revealed the current wiretapping scandal could be fined or imprisoned or both. Keep in mind that existing laws already make such acts punishable offenses in cases where classified information gets disclosed to unauthorized persons. Currently, the burden of proof rests with the government, which is of course as it should be in a democracy that values free speech and limited government powers, but the new bill would change that so that the revelation of government surveillance in and of itself would be a punishable crime. Yet another example of the Republican party’s intent to extend the powers of the executive branch to the point where we begin to lay the legal preconditions that make dictatorship possible.

The Republicans lately seem to behave as if they will control the executive branch indefinitely and therefore can do away with the important checks and balances that have been written into our constitution. We can only guess that Jefferson and Adams are rolling in their graves when they see such laws and that Republicans themselves will come to have deep regrets about these efforts when they find themselves once again the minority party, which they inevitably will. These actions are short-sighted and pose a real danger to the future of our democracy. If the American conservative movement ever had any principles worth defending, those were the ideas of limited government, devolution of power from the federal government unto states and localities and individual liberty vis-à-vis the central government. They have been less adept at defending freedom of speech, though it should in theory be a core conservative value. It defies credulity, then, to see the massive campaign recently on the part of Republicans to limit free speech, to violate Americans’ privacy without probable cause, to intimidate the judiciary and the press, and to bolster the power of the executive. It seems as though, as a party under the leadership of Tom DeLay and George Bush in particular, the Republicans have descended to the ugly strong-arm tactics that one sees in budding dictatorships and in defiance of the core principles that conservative Republicans like Aiken and Goldwater fought for not so long ago. I remember a friend, some years ago, hearing an interview with Goldwater remark that at first he was so surprised at how reasonable Goldwater had become until he realized that Goldwater hadn’t changed his views at all, but that the Republican party had drifted so far from Goldwater-style conservatism that it made Goldwater sound like a liberal.

Addendum for those who don’t know who Barry Goldwater and George Aiken are.

Goldwater was a five-term senator from Arizona and one-time presidential candidate, who was

attacked by Democrats and opponents within his own party as a demagogue and a leader of right-wing extremists and racists who was likely to lead the United States into nuclear war, eliminate civil rights progress and destroy such social welfare programs as Social Security.

Goldwater voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (though he integrated his family’s department stores and the Arizona National Guard), was a supporter of McCarthy to the bitter end (but labelled Nixon the most dishonest person he had ever known), spoke in favor of repealing Social Security, and took a hawkish stance toward the Soviet Union. Other parts of his career, though, are germane to the discussion at hand.

A stickler for the Constitution, Mr. Goldwater refused to join the Republicans of the New Right during the 1980s when they began to press for legislation that would limit the authority of the federal courts to curb organized prayer in public schools or to order busing for school integration. He opposed busing and he backed prayer in schools, Mr. Goldwater said, but he thought it a dangerous breach of the separation of powers for Congress to be telling the courts what to do.

During the Watergate crisis, Goldwater contended that president Nixon had shown

a tendency to dibble and dabble and argue on very nebulous grounds like executive privilege and confidentiality when all the American people wanted to know was the truth.

In brief, Goldwater represented the worst of American conservatism of the era, but in his later years opposed the religious right’s involvement in politics not because he opposed their ideas, but on the same consistitutional grounds that forced him to oppose the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and support legalized abortion, namely an opposition to legislating morality. One can only imagine how disappointed he would be with the Bush administration’s attempts to weaken our constitutional protections.

George Aiken, on the other hand, was the crusty long-term Republican from Vermont who in 1967 advocated as a solution to the Vietnam war that we declare victory and go home. He was an old-school Republican from a farming culture, who broke up big monopolies in Vermont and encouraged farmers to create co-ops, and favored government involvement in rural electrification programs, food stamp programs and other such “liberal” causes, such that some labelled him a communist. By the end of his career, though, he along with Mike Mansfield were seen by many as the conscience of the US Senate.