Hayyim Feldman, Tikkun Community Organizer, guestblogging:
Dear Senator Feingold,
I was very glad to learn about your proposal to censure President Bush and other members of his Administration. The purpose of this open letter is to make a case for a modification that I ask you to please consider.
The trouble with impeachment or non-impeachment
I've been unsatisfied by what I've heard from both sides of the discussions among progressives about whether or not to impeach. It would indeed be a travesty to let the Administration's real crimes and contempt for the United States Constitution pass with no authoritative public accounting, leaving everyone but the leading perpetrators to suffer the consequences of the Administration's misdeeds while the concentration of unchecked executive power remains intact. But it seems exceedingly unlikely that an impeachment effort could achieve any results worth the certain political and moral cost.
Your proposed resolutions deftly circumvent some of the serious drawbacks of impeachment. The first of these is that despite the "no-brainer" attitude of many impeachment advocates, support both in Congress and among the public (even Democrats) remains slim. When a real progressive solution seems out of reach, I generally favor taking the time to patiently build a constituency for it (e.g., universal single-payer health care) rather than expending a lot of political energy on flawed half-measures. Unfortunately, the progressive passion for impeachment has come too late in the Bush Administration's life-span to permit such a luxury. At this point, the most probable result would be to preclude any serious attention to other pressing matters of national concern, while still failing to win the conviction(s) that most impeachment supporters believe would be the only adequate corrective to the Administration's broad assault on Constitutional liberties and division of powers.
The country needs this Congress - especially now, after the institution's long dormancy - to stand firmly against the Bush Administration's criminal transgressions and against the destructive political policies it has already tried or will yet try to institute, whether by law or by executive fiat. That requires precisely the sort of resolve demanded by impeachment advocates and others - a resolve sorely lacking when, for example, the Democratic-led Congress instead collaborates in weakening FISA protections of American privacy rights or, worse, funding President Bush's war on Iraq. Yet at the same time, many Americans are concerned that the resolve motivating any impeachment proceedings would quickly degenerate into an extended bout of mere partisan sniping such as occurred toward the end of the Clinton presidency. (I have to say that the more I hear the rancor of the pro-impeachment blogosphere, the more that concern seems reasonable to me.) The spectacle of an impeachment attempt every eight years by whichever major party has been out of the White House for two presidential terms, even if it did not continue beyond 2008, could only aggravate the widespread sense that our nation is divided not only by differences of political perspective but by a deeper clash of red and blue cultures.
Between, on the one hand, a mudslinging match of impeachment that leaves the American people's pressing needs and longing for political community unattended to, or on the other, the impunity in high places and whittling away of constitutional democracy ratified by a failure to impeach, there is not much to choose. Either scenario can serve equally well to reinforce what Rabbi Michael Lerner appropriately calls the "cynical realism" by which the opinion-making industry shields the corrupt and corrupting status quo from any vision that threatens to re-inspire hopeful participation in politics as a form of democratic self-governance and mutual care.
The considerable advantages of censure
Your censure resolutions bring a sharp edge to cut through this double bind. Like impeachment, they provide a forum for members of Congress to put the basic case regarding the Bush Administration's crimes and abuses of power on the public record. Since passage of censure, unlike impeachment, requires only a simple majority of a one-time vote, censure has far more chance to succeed in one or both houses of Congress, while generating far less disruption of governance. If it does succeed it inscribes in the historical record a clear repudiation by a co-equal branch of government of the Administration's egregious assaults on the Bill of Rights and balance of powers. The mere fact of a debate about these resolutions on the Senate floor, if it shifts the balance of an impeachment resolution's reception by the public and in Congress, might yet make a credible move to impeach possible. Or if they fail, the resolutions will still have provided an opportunity for a thorough public airing of the facts, and if that case was persuasive those who defeat the resolution can be held accountable by their constituencies.
The failures of censure
But there are other, equally serious drawbacks of impeachment that your censure resolutions share. President Bush and his Administration could not have - and did not - do what they have done alone. Congress authorized the military aggression against Iraq (despite most legislators' failure to read the intelligence documents presenting the alleged rationale), continues to fund the occupation, and has accepted benchmarks for the war's "success" that include opening Iraq's oil resources to U.S. corporations (granting them 30-year contracts which would then be cited to justify a 30-year U.S. military presence there). Congress passed the Patriot Act and the Military Commissions Act, most recently backed warrantless wiretapping of Americans, and has done nothing to obstruct the Administration's erasure of habeas corpus or its legitimization and use of torture. The actions and non-actions of Congress - Democrats as well as Republicans - have been essential in enabling the Bush Administration's high crimes and misdemeanors or in justifying them after the fact.
Just as United States complicity in propping up and arming Saddam Hussein and other repressive regimes throughout the Middle East undercut any credibility the U.S. might otherwise have had in the eyes of the world to intervene on behalf of the Iraqi people, so the complicity of Congress - both Republicans and Democrats - denies Congress the credibility to assign unilateral blame to the Executive branch. That lack of credibility is a central reason why either impeachment proceedings or censure would be widely and properly perceived as partisan politics, even if every single charge made against the Bush Administration were both true and well substantiated. The successful impeachment and conviction of President Bush and Vice President Cheney could protect only our constitutional democracy from their "unitary executive" power grab. That is no small accomplishment, but neither impeachment nor censure would do anything to address the larger crisis of national spirit that faces us: the massive moral breakdown of our entire political system. No mere restoration of domestic political equilibrium can bootstrap us up from the posture of arrogant cruelty we have adopted toward nations and persons. (For one illustrative account, see the chilling section on "Why Torture Continues" in the May-June 2007 issue of TIKKUN magazine.)
Repentance and restitution
So when Impeachment supporters criticize censure as "too little," they are half right. The truth is, something more than either censure or impeachment is needed: We need, first of all, to begin to undo, as much as possible, the grave damage that we - our country, our government, and both major political parties - have done in Iraq. That undoing can only begin with an honest acknowledgment of error and culpability, and with a heartfelt expression of remorse to those whom we have so severely harmed, or to their survivors. We need a censure resolution that is as much about accepting responsibility as assigning it. After waging aggressive war, there is no other way that we as a nation - and sole global hyperpower - can reclaim moral stature in the world. Perhaps more important, asking forgiveness (whether it is forthcoming or not) is indispensible for healing the habit of racist violence that has afflicted our country since its founding and has led us swaggering once again into the folly of militarism; indispensible for our ability to make this time be the last time, and to return to the self-evident truths that have far outgrown the flawed founders who bequeathed them to us in the first lines spoken to the world by this nation at its birth.
I write this open letter in the month of Elul on the Jewish calendar, a month dedicated to both personal and collective repentance and return to the loving ways of G!d, which culminates in Rosh HaShannah, the new year, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. The name of this month is said to be an acronym for the Hebrew phrase, Ani l'dodi, v'dodi li - "I am my beloved's and my beloved is mine," and the month itself is seen as a time of special intimacy with G!d, calling for great acts of love among us: We seek each other out to ask for and, if we can, generously offer one another forgiveness. The work of repentance and return, in other words, is understood not in terms of wrath and appeasement, but as a work of love. Far from gnashing our teeth or wallowing in guilt and shame, the willingness to face our own misdeeds, without fleeing from ourselves or from those whom we have hurt or let down, is the way to escape the entrapment in guilt and shame that can compel us to repeat our old patterns endlessly.
The United States government recognized the need for such national repentance when the 100th Congress passed, President Reagan signed into law, and the administrations of George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton implemented the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 regarding Japanese-Americans interned some 45 years earlier, during World War II. This act explicitly stated that "the Congress recognizes that...a grave injustice was done" and "apologizes on behalf of the Nation," and it provided for modest monetary restitution to surviving internees. Last month the present Congress, too, affirmed the human value and political efficacy of repentance for achieving harmony between nations and peoples when it passed a resolution urging the government of Japan to "formally acknowledge, apologize, and accept historical responsibility in a clear and unequivocal manner for its Imperial Armed Force's coercion of young women into sexual slavery." But this Congress would do well to remember one of the stated purposes of the 1988 Civil Liberties Act: "To make more credible and sincere any declaration of concern by the United States over violations of human rights committed by other nations." It's time to attend to the beam that now obstructs our own vision.
We have seen repeatedly how strategies of domination and control, whether by armed force or "soft" diplomatic and economic coercion, fail to win peace, security, or good will, in part because their very "success" in enabling U.S. elites to exploit cheap labor and resources breeds fear, antagonism, and a reciprocal belligerence toward the United States. As our planet is "shrinking," becoming ever more interconnected - ecologically, culturally, digitally, economically, and so on - the dependence of each person, tribe, nation, region, and species on the well-being of others is increasingly revealed. The deep bond that ties us all so inextricably together is the real hyperpower, not U.S. military or economic might. It's time for Americans to give up the naive and self-destructive real-politik fantasy that "ethics have no place in international relations," or that we can lift ourselves up by treating others as suspect until they bow to our agenda. It's time to reinvent our relationships with our neighbors and lead in a different way, through generous acts of caring and solidarity, which are no less likely to elicit reciprocation. Our bottom line must be, yes, commitment to diplomacy, human rights, international law and similar good progressive prescriptions, but more than that, the underlying sense of identification with and affirmation of the other, the compassion and love of neighbor from which those principles derive their power.
Is that a more far-reaching transformation of consciousness than can be accomplished in a single stroke? No matter. There is a Hasidic teaching that every time a sin is committed, Heaven rejoices at the creation of a new pathway for repentance. Our opportunity of the moment is a modest beginning for this vital spiritual healing: Simply to step up to our obligation to make good as much as possible of the devastation we have caused in Iraq. We owe them support equal to the need - controlled by Iraqis through non-governmental organizations with good track records of effective and honest grassroots development work, conflict transformation, and the like. This is an obligation that we can't meet until we find the political will and humble dignity to acknowledge what we have done - and we owe it now, not decades later.
Senator Feingold, I urge you to pursue this honest national self-examination with your colleagues, your constituents, and the American people. I ask you to consider the possibility of revising your resolutions censuring the Bush Administration in such a way as to broaden the back that bears responsibility for our collective moral failure and to begin making restitution - and to discuss this possibility not only with your cosponsors but with your Republican counterparts who recognize the wrongheadedness of this war and may be amenable to a resolution that repudiates it in inclusive rather than partisan terms.
Could the course I am suggesting have any more political legs now than impeachment does? I don't know. But unlike impeachment, there is no end-of-term deadline on facing up to one's misdeeds. And I do know that no Democratic Party or other force afraid to challenge the prevailing cynical realism of our national political class will be able to do much more than fiddle around the edges while the planet burns and the icecaps melt. If there is any progressive initiative worth taking the time and even losing some votes over in the interest of patiently building a constituency for longterm fundamental change, it is the kind of thoroughgoing reconstitution of the moral and spiritual basis of our national politics and governance that can begin with a simple act of atonement and can lead toward a national rebirth.
Thank you for taking the time to read this, Senator, and for your censure proposal which helped me clarify my own thoughts on the matter. I look forward to your response, and would welcome any further discussion of these ideas with you, should you be so moved.
Hayyim Feldman, Organizer
hayyim@tikkun.org
Boston Tikkun Community / Network of Spiritual Progressives