From www.RawStory column "
No Tommorrow" by John Steinberg.
And just think, Robert Byrd, Kent Conrad, Joe Lieberman, etc. all sought & help made it happen.
As Benjamin Franklin left the final day of deliberation by the Constitutional Convention in 1787, a citizen supposedly asked him, "Well, Doctor, what have we got--a Republic or a Monarchy?" Franklin replied, "A Republic, if you can keep it."
If all goes as planned, in a week or so that Republic will finally escape our grip. When the Senate votes to affirm Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, the central tenet of our government - the separation of powers - will take a blow from which it will likely never recover. In its place a de facto monarchy will solidify and expand, and our own Constitution will join the Geneva Convention as a quaint anachronism.
Only days ago, The Supreme Court let stand the conviction of a protester who committed the so-called "crime" of holding a 'no war for oil' sign at a Bush event held on public property in South Carolina in 2002. The Department of Justice has begun demanding that Google and other internet search providers turn over all internet search records. Conservatives are paying students to expose "radical" (liberal) college professors.
The NSA domestic spying scandal exposes the overthrow of the judiciary by this Administration. Bush's naked attempt to eviscerate the ban on torture even as it nominally accepted it is a takeover of the legislative function. Nobody -- not even Richard Nixon" has ever asserted the right to usurp both of those powers to the executive until now. What Bush wants, and Alito is happy to deliver, is an absolute monarchy -- exactly what the Founding Fathers fought hardest to avoid.
While the Bush administration has shown itself incapable of prosecuting even one war at a time abroad, it has mounted the most direct challenge to Congressional power in the history of our republic. And on each of these fronts, effective resistance has been largely non-existent. Congress cheers at its own subjugation as Austria welcomed the Anschluss. If these Congressional "public servants" see their roles as anything other than an opportunity for graft, they will find that they have sawed off the branch on which they sit well inboard of their perch. In any event, the result will be the destruction of a structure that has stood for two centuries.