The President’s Attack on DemocracyPresident Bush has declared that we are in a state of war, a War on Terror. This is not a war in traditional sense,

The President’s Attack on Democracy

President Bush has declared that we are in a state of war, a War on Terror. This is not a war in traditional sense, as it involves both an enemy that is not exclusively a nation and tactics that are not exclusively military. In fact, the War on Terror is a conflict more akin to the War on Drugs or the War on Poverty than to World War I, World War II or Viet Nam. It is a struggle against a concept or, more precisely, a tactic used by a loosely connected faction of people with similar ideologies who rabidly dislike our culture, our morals, our worldview and our way of life.Like the other so-called “wars”, this is a war for which there can be no real victory and no known end. There will always be poverty, there will always be drugs and there will always be enemies that wish to do us harm. In fact, the president himself once candidly admitted in an interview that, in regard to the war on terror, “"I don't think you can win it, but I think you can create conditions so that those who use terror as a tool are less acceptable in parts of the world.” He also said in a speech to the American Legion, “In this different kind of war, we may never sit down at a peace table."The president, having declared we are at war, further states in essence that in wartime the powers of the executive branch are expanded, and he has the right granted him by the Constitution not only to uphold the law, but also to interpret and create law, as necessary. Thus, he conveys “enemy combatant” status to get around due process statutes. He uses rendering as a means of avoiding bans on torture. He engages in warrantless wiretapping to eavesdrop on Americans in circumvention of FISA laws. And, most egregiously, he vigorously uses “Presidential Signing Statements” to simply opt out of any law passed by Congress with which he chooses not to comply. This is exactly the kind of autocracy from which the Founding Fathers declared their independence.The only way President Bush can maintain this power is to maintain that we are in a state of war. Ending the war means eliminating his power. He will not likely take that step unilaterally. As long as there is no check on this kind of presidential power, the basic freedoms granted to all Americans in the Constitution and Bill of Rights simply no longer exist. Members of Congress must do one of two things. They must either remove the president from office through the constitutionally mandated process of impeachment on the grounds of high crimes and misdemeanors, or exert their responsibilities under the War Powers Act, which prescribes the balance of power between the president and Congress in declaring war. In doing so, it is up to Congress to take the bold step and assert that it has not in fact declared war, and thus never vested the president with wartime powers the type and scope of which he seems so prone to exploit.
Their failure to take one of these two steps amounts to nothing less than an abdication of Constitutional responsibility and a serious threat to the checks and balances inherent in a representative democracy.Congress must act now to end this executive branch tyranny.