Recent Presidents seem to have interperted their role as the execution of the law (Execute: as in to kill by lethal injection). Rather than seeing their role as to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution and the Laws of the United States we have "Unitary Executives" trying to place themselves and their interests above the Law with signing statements, executive orders, and the machinations of think tanks and lobbiests.
For some months now the Obama administration has been defending and even extending the interpertations of a lot of Bush era bad ideas. In particular the idea that we can have classes of people who are treated differently under the law as for example "terrorists" to be judged guilty by accusation and then kidnapped, tortured, indefinitely detained without trials or the usual protections of counsel.
I recently responded to an email from a senior fellow at one of the countries oldest think tanks who thought a recent NPR discussion of his proposals I diaried on cited the wrong article in the series.
Please excuse the intended as constructive criticism of an old man ranting at you when I desire to communicate with you but I'm very concerned that the President is not getting good advice from the ______ Institution
It struck me that you are young and being so young one sometimes misses the historical context of what we have gone through to be a nation in which freedom, justice and liberty have meaning not only to us but to the rest of the world.
My father fought on Guadalcanal and my war was Vietnam. I have lived in the middle east and asia among its people and found that generally speaking people are people and like the people of Iran rising in the streets against the excesses of their government not the enemies or extremists governments paint them as.
Americans have shed a lot of blood to preserve things like equal justice under the law, the right to a speedy trial by a jury of your peers, the constitution and its protections. As a global power we need to as the President puts it "lead by example."
This is the part where Constitutionally Congress should be doing the leading and the President following their lead. The problem is that we have a do nothing Congress, a particularly competent, amazingly wise, thoughtful, and articluate President, and some really bad legal advice coming from the experts he is given to listen to.
Changing our laws because some of us are panicked by a few clever and dedicated individuals having worked out a way to drive their points about our global injustices home, or because we were overly impressed with the clever legal arguments of John Yoo and the Federalist Society is ridiculous. If we are panicked into changing our entire systems of law and justice by the actions of a few that would mean we have allowed the few real terrorists, fear mongers and extremeists to win and in the process destroyed the very idea of America land of the brave and home of the free for everyone.
I'm afraid we are reaching a point where we the people can not make informed decisions about whether or not to give our consent to our government because it lies to us and keeps secrets. If this were a marriage we would be in the position of the wife saying she has no idea where her husband is hanging out these days. He could be out hiking the Appalachin trail, he could be in Argentiana, all we know is he isn't home with us.
3000 some odd Americans died due the Bush administrations incompetence on 9/11. More than that died due to the Bush administrations second great manifestation of incompetence with Katrina. More than that have died as the result of unnecessary military involvement we were lied into because of the thought procresses of think tanks and legal scholars which continue to be made worse by foolish distinctions between the rights of Americans and the rest of the world in an age of multinational corporations.
I'd like to see us pressuring Congress to do the necessary oversight of the things they spend our money on, to provide the proper regulation to enable the FDA to properly control tobacco and the EPA to properly control pollouters and those who want cheap fossil fuel energy regardless of the costs to the environment, but I fear its an uphill battle because of the damage being done by the Pentagon's propaganda machine, the thinktanks talking points, and drafts of legislation like the patriot Act, the Military Commissions Act, the Detainee Treatment Act, ACES and now Healthcares "Public Option".
If we continue on our present course we will be responsible for the deaths of billions by engines of mass destruction; overpopulation, polution, war, plague, famine, pestilence, global warming, rising sea levels; in short we will destroy our planet, possibly within your lifetime. The only solution to these issues is a global cooperative effort and your premise that American Laws have no International implications is destructive of these goals and commitments.
Somehow we need to get things back on track with a Supreme Court that can marry a little wisdom with the absolute power of our laws and bring to bear some justice.
Its the rights of our customers and business partners we are treading on and its making us less safe not more safe. The war we should never have cut and run from was the war on poverty. Around the world the perceived injustice between the quality of life we have created for the haves and have nots is the problem. The people giving their lives to drive that point home to us with individual acts of sacrifice and terrible destruction aren't madmen or fools. They wouldn't be doing that
if we changed our ways. What you propose is a slippery slope back down the hill we have just so laboriously climbed.
I'm particularly disturbed by the idea that we should have classes of people to whom the laws apply differently. Starting at the top we have "if the President does it its legal". Then we have banks and corporations which are "too big to fail" so normal bankruptcy laws don't apply to them and the government bails them out at taxpayer expense. Next come the various tax loopholes for corporations, the haves and have nots, "deregulation" for those who can afford to pay lobbiests so that bills intended to curb the excesses of poluters, insurance companies, energy companies desiring to despoil public lands in their search for the obscene profits coming from the cheap fossil fuel energy that is destroying our planet and after a long slippery slope of plea bargains and deals, way down at the bottom we have a class of people to be pressumed guilty, kidnapped, tortured, and indefinitely detained without trial.
These things you and your collegues propose are not minor modifications, they are attacks on the essential fairness and universal nature of the system.
To see of all things a law professor trashing everything that makes America great doesn't sit well with me.
How is it think tanks and academics that nobody ever voted for or elected are the people drafting our legislation? I'm appreciative of Obama's desire to listen to the widest possible range of experts on every topic, but in the case of those people who are being paid to mislead us by special interests it might be good to get a second opinion. Our approach to international law and foreign policy in particular is a disaster. We are illiterate in more languages than we speak and have no idea of how patronizing our approaches to the problems of our planet sound to the rest of its inhabitants.
There has been much made of patriarchal Mosaic law on the right, as if America were entitled to act as Patriarch for the rest of the world and dispense its version of absolute power without regard for the interests of the rest of the world
Go back and look at The Written Law when it was first being formed as a consensus of what was right and proper and its intent was to make "The Written Law" a thing carved in stone and made sovereign over the spoken words of the pharoahs and kings. People literally worshiped the law. They carved its image in stone, housed it in an ark and placed the ark in a sanctuary in the Egyptian manner.
The first problem they ran into was that the absolute power of any law which had no consort with wisdom could never bear justice.
The written law needed competent administrators, judges, who would be willing to fight to keep it pure. The justice of Solomon
comes from the marriage of Asherah (Maa't, Hathor, Diatoma; an Eros for Wisdom) with the power of the law (El, Al, Iah, Yah)
The story of Abraham compares the Egyptian concepts of Hotep and Maa't personified in the Egyptian handmaiden Hagar with Sharia Law
personified in the wife/sister Sarai/Sarah (same triliteral semitic root) Look at the covenants with the four gods in the story, El Shaddai, lord of the land or earth, Yahwah, the power of the air and all high things, moloch the power of fire to which Abraham sacrifices a ram on Mount Moriah and El Roi the god of the well or water and the presence of the elements of natural philosophy shows these were probably added as a Greek or Phoenician gloss to the bronze age origins. People have been wrestling with these issues a long time.
Again please excuse and humour me as an old man for ranting at you when I desire to communicate with you but I am very concerned that the President is not getting good advice from the ______ Institution. I'm afraid you are misinterperting more than my post and though we both probably have
lots to apologize for, its what America has to apologize for that I'm concerned with.
I hope you will join us in discussing this on the Daily Kos as we figure out how to properly address the issue.
regards,
rktect
How can We the People get ourselves better represented in this decision making process