This diary began as an ostensible response to Devilstower's front page post on Senator Dodd's answers in the UNLV debate on constitutional rights and national security. As DT has updated his post a few times, explaining that he seeks to hold Dodd to a high standard, I'd like to think of this post as an opportunity for me to elucidate Senator Dodd's long standing opposition to the false choice of security versus liberties.
In the debate, Senator Dodd spoke directly to the question of whether we should choose security over our Constitution.
"But there ought not to be any correlation here. When you take the oath of office, you don't swear to uphold the Constitution or protect the country. I believe by upholding our rights, we do protect the country. And the administration has taken the opposite view. They are posing to us the false choice, the dichotomy that to be safer, we have to give up rights. I think that is so fundamentally flawed and fundamentally dangerous for the United States of America to embrace that idea."
This is by no means the first time Senator Dodd has called out the Bush administration and those who would have us surrender our liberties in an effort to make us safer -- he's been calling out people who say this for a long time.
Dodd has a number of op-eds in the Huffington Post about the necessity of standing up for the Constitution in order to make us safer. Earlier this month, Senator Dodd had a piece up titled, "We Defend the Constitution to Protect the Country". In it, he wrote:
Can we defend America if we fail to defend our Constitution and the rule of law?
That's not a loaded question--there are a good number of Americans who say the answer is Yes.
They don't answer that question lightly. They are well-intentioned. They believe that the terrorist threat we're facing is so vast, so unprecedented, that parts of our Constitution become luxuries and the Geneva Conventions has become, in the words of the former Attorney General, "quaint."
...
Rather, we defend the Constitution--and the values it expresses--precisely to protect the country. America's moral authority isn't incidental to our security - it's the very foundation. Restoring our belief in this most fundamental of American principles is the challenge we face today.
You can see a video of Senator Dodd speaking these words here, as part of a larger speech on the rule of law.
During the course of the debate in Nevada, Senator Dodd raised his oath of office as a base point for how he thinks about questions of upholding the Constitution. This isn't a new subject for him. Earlier this year, Dodd had a Huffington Post piece titled, "My Oath of Office," which discusses this in depth.
The truth is, I never thought I'd be running for President on a platform of restoring the Constitution and America's standing in the world or something as elementary as honoring the oath of office we take. But with our security at risk, we haven't any other choice. I haven't forgotten the words I first uttered on January 4th, 1975 and I will dedicate myself to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic until I take the oath of office on January 20, 2009 - this time, as the President of the United States. I hope you'll stand with me and ask your Senators to do the same as they consider further funding for the war in Iraq and retroactive immunity for telecom companies.
Dodd's consistently framed his thinking on congressional action on Iraq and Bush administration domestic surveillance on upholding the Constitution and how to keep America safe in so doing. Once again, Dodd had an op-ed in the Huffington Post in early June that makes the case that restoring America's standing in the world begins with restoring the Constitution and habeas corpus. Chris Dodd has been an outspoken leader on defending the Constitution, not only in the field of presidential candidates, but in the Senate on whole.
But enough of me going back to what Senator Dodd has written and done. There's plenty of video evidence of Dodd's standing on this, so here goes:
"This false dichotomy that we're only going to be safer if we give up our rights is something that I cannot stand for any longer."
"You're gonna get your Constitution back"
"I am really angry about this notion that you have to make a choice between being more secure and having to give up rights. That is a false choice."
"I would [restore the Constitutional rights in this country] in the first day"
"There's no more patriotic act than to defend the Constitution of the United States"
Dodd explains why he introduced the Restoring the Constitution Act
This is hardly an exhaustive list of videos where Dodd stands up for the Constitution and pushes back on the false choice between security and liberty. Senator Dodd didn't wait until it came up in a debate to start talking about the Constitution. He didn't wait until me or another Dodd staffer handed him a briefing book and told him that the Constitution was an issue that a lot of people online and offline care about. Standing up for the rule of law is practically in Dodd's DNA, as his father, Thomas Dodd, was a prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials.
I agree with Devilstower that Dodd and all our other presidential candidates should be held to a very high standard. After all, our next President will be tasked with not only supporting and defending the Constitution, but in many ways with restoring it. I wouldn't be working for Chris Dodd if I didn't believe in my core that he would ensure that the Constitution is there permanently for all Americans and that he would do everything in his power to protect it. I hope that I've made a case that impresses the same truth upon you as well.
Disclosure: I proudly work for Chris Dodd's presidential campaign.