It is early in the morning of Friday, November 9, 2007. Less than 5 hours ago, the United States Senate voted to confirm Michael Mukasey as the 81st Attorney General of the United States:
- Michael Mukasey, who as federal district judge for the Southern District of New York, ruled that the President has the powerto detain American citizens on U.S. soil indefinitely without ever having to charge them with a crime;
- Michael Mukasey, who refused to call waterboarding either "torture" or "illegal" or "unconstitutional;"
- Michael Mukasey, who testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that, in his considered legal opinion, the President has the legal authority to violate laws passed by Congress.
After the MCA, FISA, the "surge," the passive failure to enforce subpoenas in the face of flagrant contempt, the Kyl-Lieberman "Iran is the new Iraq" resolution, the Cheney impeachment fiasco, and now AG Mukasey, I have reached what seems to be the only reasonable conclusion: that our government is broken, perhaps (although I desperately hope not) beyond all hope of repair and redemption.
(More downstairs)
Even as I write this, the United States government -- my government; your government -- is almost certainly torturing people (some who may very well be guilty of plotting to bring harm to the American people; and undoubtedly many who are not). Even as I write this, the United States government -- my government; your government -- is intercepting the calls, emails, internet activity of certainly thousands, and perhaps millions of Americans.
American constitutional representative democracy is broken. And something must be done to highlight its brokenness and to force the issue to a resolution.
So, what is to be done? And why now? Haven't we been here, like, half a dozen times before over the past several months?
Much like the (apocryphal) metaphor of the slowly boiling frog, it seems that we have been slowly adapting ourselves to an America with fewer and fewer fundamental guarantees and built-in protections of our basic civil liberties. The following excerpt from Milton Mayer's They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45 addresses the same point as the "boiling frog" metaphor in a more literary manner, and highlights the unique risks and dangers of a situation which seems chillingly analogous to the modern American condition:
"To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it — please try to believe me — unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, 'regretted,' that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these 'little measures' that no 'patriotic German' could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head. . . .
"You see," my colleague went on, "one doesn't see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for the one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don't want to act, or even to talk, alone; you don't want to "go out of your way to make trouble." Why not? - Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.
"Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, ‘everyone’ is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You know, in France or Italy there would be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this. In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re seeing things’ or ‘You’re an alarmist.’
"And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can't prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don't know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.
"But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked - if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
"And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying 'Jewish swine,' collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in - your nation, your people - is not the world you were in at all."
Also as I write this, Benazir Bhutto is under house arrest in Pakistan, and (as it is now Friday midday) I suspect there are now, once again, suit-and-tie-wearing Pakistani attorneys rallying in the streets in support of the Rule of Law. Meanwhile, here in the self-proclaimed birthplace of liberty, the United States Senate outdoes itself again with yet another grotesque parody of constitutionalism, elevating to the position of chief law enforcement officer of the United States a man who refuses to say that waterboarding is torture, who believes that the President has kingly powers to detain any American citizen indefinitely at his whim, who believes that the President is not bound by the law.
Where are our lawyers rallying in the streets? We know now that something happened in connection with the Bush Administration's electronic surveillance program which almost led 30 senior justice department lawyers to resign en masse following the infamous bedside visit with John Ashcroft.
I suppose my question is, why haven't there been not scores, but hundreds if not thousands of resignations in principle by government employees? After all, there are a great number of our civil servants who are smart enough (and likewise many who are directly involved enough) not to be able to legitimately claim they are unaware of the extent of the crisis of American constitutional government.
How many Assistant U.S. Attorneys are there around the United States -- the vast majority of them not partisan hacks, but rather intelligent and driven and civic-minded young men and women who willingly chosen to work for the government (and for significantly less money than they could be making at large law firms)? Why are they still working there? What white lies are they telling themselves to enable themselves to sleep at night? That they are "doing more good working within the system than they could outside?" Or do most instead choose not even to confront the issue at all, and go on about their lives pretending everything is normal, pretending American constitutional representative democracy is humming along just fine -- just as, to a greater or lesser extent, we all have been?
And what of the Congressional Aides, many of them likewise young, idealistic, civic-minded individuals who have come to D.C. to work in prestigious and highly competitive Capitol Hill jobs in the belief that they can help make the world a better place? Surely it is now obvious that not only are they not making the world better, but rather they are complicit -- in flagrant violation of the oaths that they, too, swear, to uphold the Constitution of the United States -- in a system which has been steadily dismantling the rule of law and aggrandizing the authoritarian power of the executive branch.
At a certain point, mustn't they, too, ask themselves whether it might not be better and more effective to stand on principle, to refuse to work for the Senators and Representatives who have traded away the rights of American citizens in a crass and cynical exchange for residual political power?
In short, where are the mass resignations in protest?
And when do they begin?