With political news looking almost universally bleak for the Republican column, with seats looking competitive that only 2 years ago were considered rock-solid, there's an understandable tendency to think that flipping more seats from (R) to (D) will magically solve all our problems.
I'm reminded of the days 5 years ago, when similar predictions were made - "we will be greeted as liberators" and so on. It wasn't that simple then, and it isn't as simple now.
(More after the cut - and please be nice, this is my first time)
If there is one lesson that needs to be taken from 2006, it's that simply putting (D) on a seat, or even enough seats to make a majority, isn't enough to do... well, anything. I do not fault the leadership totally for this, nor do I fault specific congresspeople, though the temptation is quite strong.
Come November, 2008, provided the tinfoil hat-wearers aren't right (and I refuse to rule out even that possibility), there will likely be a sigh of relief that will be heard from Maine to the Aleutians. The sense that a long national nightmare will finally be over. There will be an exciting few months during the transition, but with luck, and assuming trends this far out can be extrapolated a year and some months ahead, there will be a lot more (D)s holding seats in Washington, D.C., including the occupancy of the Oval Office.
There will be a temptation to put it behind us. Get it over with. Let the past be the past. In the face of an almost guaranteed pardon on the way out the door, positively Fordian in character, the temptation will be to simply shrug, say "they're out of reach", and move on. After all, we've neglected the business of this country for too long, almost this entire decade. People are being tossed from their homes, New Orleans is still horribly broken, bridges are falling over and people are still dying of things like tooth infections. And then there will be the sorry fact that soldiers will likely still be dying in Iraq.
These are things about people, people who vote, people who write letters, people who appear on television asking why these things are still happening. Their voices can't and won't be ignored, that much is as certain as day follows night. However, there are previous few voices out there that will speak for the other victim of the last decade - the Constitution and the entire range of laws, customs, traditions and functions that springs forth therefrom.
And this brings me to the warning I want to get out there, almost 18 months before the current government passes entirely into history and is replaced by a new one. A reminder that I want to be at least on the periphery of every person who takes a seat of power in Washington, D.C., in January, 2009.
Do not let the evisceration of the Constitution stand!
It will be tempting, especially under the aegis of a President Clinton, Obama, Edwards, Richardson, Gore, or other that might yet surface, to let these repairs wait for another day, when the more important things are done to get things on an even keel. After all, a PATRIOT Act, a Military Commissions Act, "amended" FISA, and so forth are far less sinister in the hands of someone without a dreaded (R) after their name, right?
Memories fade, and political memories in Washington, D.C. are as ephemeral as summertime dew. As January becomes February, March, and Easter Recess, and bills to rebuild New Orleans, start to draw down troops in Iraq, inventory the prisoners still held in Guantanamo Bay and in the strange gulag archipelago that stretches across the world pass from Congress to White House and sometimes back again, concerns over the PATRIOT Act and its thousand faceless spawn will fade in the afterglow of finally getting things done. By September, warrantless wiretapping, signing statements and national security letters will simply be the bitter aftertaste of a nightmare left with the sunrise.
And this will go on - until some day someone else with an (R) after their name comes to occupy the Oval Office. And because we were too busy fixing the "immediate problems", we didn't "want to open an old wound", and "couldn't do anything anyway because of the pardons", the tools, the weapons used to mangle the Constitution in a most horrible and unnatural way will still be sitting there in a drawer, unused in so long but still sharp and capable.
Unless these tools are repudiated without question, loudly and clearly struck from the arsenal already available to the Office of the (Vice-)Presidency, they will come back in a future day to again wound us as a nation deeply, and perhaps even more permanently than they already have.
Let us, the activists, the observers, and the incipient politicians alike, take this to heart. Please. It may not be as glamorous or seem as immediately necessary as many of the other things we will do, but it takes only a few minutes to draft a piece of legislation that simply says "The PATRIOT Act, the Military Commissions Act, and all regulations and laws founded thereupon are hereby revoked from the law of the United States of America."
(I would dream that we might, at the same time, revisit the older and just as pernicious an assaults on the Constitution such as the DEA and the hydra of laws and court rulings that have sprung up under the guise of the "drug war", but one can only ask so much at one time.)