The USA is at a crossroads, a pivotal moment in our nation’s journey into the future. If we take the wrong turn now, we cannot turn back and undo what we have done, and what we will have done is no less than seriously undermine the Constitution and the republic itself. We’ve been here before, and we know what to do. The question is, do we have the will to do it?
Do we have the political will to hold accountable the Bush administration and their supporters in Congress for all their misdeeds? Or will we give in to those who try to equate accountability with partisanship, finger-pointing, and living in the past?
"We will not go along with a partisan fishing expedition aimed at honorable public servants."
- George W. Bush, referring to the intent of the Senate Judiciary Committee to have Karl Rove and others testify under oath regarding their involvement in the replacement of eight US Attorneys, March 2007
"The senator now intends to focus his attention on the future security of the American people and other matters and does not expect to revisit the White House’s role in Katrina."
- Leslie Phillips, spokesperson for Senator Joe Lieberman, the new chairman of the Senate Homeland Security committee, on the Senator's decision not to pursue documents withheld by the White House and believed to be pertinent to the White House's handling of the Katrina disaster, January 2007
"I am increasingly concerned that the Senate Intelligence Committee is unable to perform its critically important oversight and threat assessment responsibilities due to stifling partisanship that is exhibited by repeated calls by Democrats on the Committee to conduct politically-motivated investigations."
- Senator Bill Frist in response to Senator Harry Reid's request for a Committee vote on Senator Jay Rockefeller's motion to hold hearings on the Bush administration's NSA wiretapping program, March 2006
"The allegation by Congressman Waxman that anything was put in [the president's energy] plan for political purposes is, of itself, a partisan waste of taxpayer money."
- former presidential press secretary Ari Fleischer on Henry Waxman's "unofficial" investigation of the Enron fiasco, which revealed "17 policies in the White House energy plan that were advocated by Enron or that benefited Enron," January 2002
"Senator Rockefeller's allegations are patently untrue. The delays came from the Democrats' insistence that they expand the scope of the inquiry to make it a more political document going into the 2006 elections."
- Jackie Cottrell, chief of staff for Senator Pat Roberts, the Republican former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, responding to allegations by Senator Jay Rockefeller that Vice President Dick Cheney exerted "constant" pressure on the Committee to delay its "Phase II" investigation into the handling of pre-war intelligence on Iraq, January 2007
"I'm not going to engage in the blame game."
- former presidential press secretary Scott McClellan refusing to address allegations by reporters that the FEMA response to Hurricane Katrina was mismanaged, early September, 2005
"It's water over the deck. Get over it."
- Antonin Scalia, referring to his 2000 Supreme Court vote in favor of declaring George W. Bush the winner of the presidential election in spite of incomplete vote counting in Florida, February 2007
Crime and punishment
We progressives believe in moving forward, of course. We believe in planning for the future, in improving the living conditions of all the people, both at home and abroad. We've been accused from time to time of living for the moment, but living in the past? Nah, it's just not our style. We need to ask the naysayers, is holding people accountable really the same as living in the past?
Of course it isn't, any more than trying someone for a murder committed five years ago is living in the past. We as a society define behavior we find unacceptable, and we decide how we shall hold accountable those persons who engage in proscribed behavior. This is what our whole system of jurisprudence is all about. The law is not some arbitrary set of restrictions designed to get in the way of people living their lives. It is the codification of our collective wisdom about how we shall and shall not conduct ourselves in a civil society.
The rule of law
We hear this phrase from time to time, frequently in conjunction with "...a nation of laws and not men," but do we really know what it means? Do we fully comprehend its ramifications, and the obligations that come with it?
The rule of law is the concept that the law reigns supreme. Not a king or an emperor or a petty tyrant, not any single man or woman, or group of men and women... the law is the Decider. We hold these truths to be self-evident... All men and women are equal under the law. No one is more equal than another. No state shall...deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. No one is above the law, nor is anyone beneath it.
Accountability is our obligation
The rule of law is a paper tiger without accountability.
There's a reason we pursue murderers dozens of years after the deed was done. It's because we believe in accountability. We know that the law means nothing – nothing - if so heinous a crime is left unpunished.
We don't believe in kings here, and we don't believe in vigilantism. We believe in due process of law, and we respect the outcomes from the exercise of due process. But without a monarch to deliver summarily an arbitrary "off with his head," we cannot ever neglect due process, or we lose all the power that the rule of law gives us, namely, self-government. We must diligently pursue accountability, especially when the stakes are as high as they are today. When the executive branch seeks to politicize law enforcement through the selective hiring and firing of the regional U.S. Attorneys....when the government sends our young people into battle, unprepared, ill-equipped, without a coherent or believable mission, and on the basis of a rationale they've known to be false from the beginning, we must stop them, but – we must also hold them accountable so that future governments know we have the political will to do so. This is our deterrent. It's the only hope we have of preventing it from happening to some future generation.
Where it finds evidence of wrongdoing in the Bush administration, the Congress must investigate, and let due process take its course. If that is all this Congress does for the rest of its term, it will have been time well-spent.
The rule of law is a paper tiger without accountability.