Progressive Liberty: Subject to Democracy & Constitution Respectively

Principles of Progressive Liberty suggest any humane society should provide for the most basic needs of all its citizens. This means, among other things, that government should guarantee that every man, woman, and child have access to basic healthcare. It's a cop-out to suggest that government is incapable of organizing a working and efficient universal healthcare system - look at the various alternatives in Europe, Canada, and elsewhere, and pick the best aspects of each. It's not rocket science, folks.

Does this mean that the Constitution mandates such government involvement?
In a word: No.

The Constitution sets up the structure of the government and imposes strict limits on governmental infringements of individual liberty; policy decisions, by contrast, are properly left to the democratic process. If the People desire a Progressive Society - as I believe they should - then they have the opportunity to create that society by voting for representatives who will legislate to that end. That's what republican Democracy is about - accountable majorities enacting policy; and if the majorities don't adequately reflect the People's wishes, someone else is elected who will.

Then if at any time the democratically-accountable majority legislates in ways that inappropriately infringe individual Liberty, the Constitution (as enforced by the Court) steps in. That's what Liberty is about - limited government constrained by a Constitution that protects, above all else, individual freedom.

Obama Momentum After Iowa

It's truly something to see a black man convincingly win the caucuses in 2% white Iowa. Question is - can Barack Obama's momentum carry through into New Hampshire and the early primaries?

Indications are that it can - it turns out that Obama is an extraordinary candidate.

As I've suggested previously, the man offers what no other candidate in this field (or any other candidate in any other field in a couple generations) does - hope for a way past the bitter partisanship and cynicism of modern politics. Oh sure - there will always be sniping and partisan gamesmanship, but Obama seems determined (and maybe, just maybe, he is able) to rise above the fray as a uniter instead of divider.

Listen to some of the comments in today’s New York Times. First, this from Bob Herbert:

“The historians can put aside their reference material. This is new. America has never seen anything like the Barack Obama phenomenon…. Mr. Obama’s message of hope, healing and change, discounted as fanciful and naïve by skeptics, drew Iowans into the frigid night air by the tens of thousands on Thursday to stand with a man who is not just running for president, but trying to build a new type of political movement….

“Shake hands with tomorrow. It’s here.

“Senator Obama’s victory speech was a concise oratorical gem. No candidate in either party can move an audience like he can. He characterized his stunning victory as an affirmation of ‘the most American of ideas – that in the face of impossible odds, people who love this country can change it….

“The Clintons, [by contrast,] especially, have seemed baffled by the winds of change. They mounted a peculiar argument against Senator Obama, acknowledging that voters wanted change but insisting that you can’t achieve change by doing things differently….

“However this election turns out, Mr. Obama can be credited with a great achievement…. More than anyone else, he has re-energized that process and put some of the fun back into politics. And he’s done it by appealing openly and consistently to the best, rather than the worst, in us.”

And this from Gail Collins:

“Nearly 40 years later [after Hillary Rodham (Clinton’s) now-famous Wellesley commencement address in which she denounced politicians as ‘always looking for some way to cut a grubby deal instead of setting their sights on the impossible dream’ and claiming that she and her generation were ‘searching for a more immediate, ecstatic and penetrating mode of living’], here she is, … campaigning in New Hampshire … warning voters that the guy who is promising to turn the whole process into something that people could actually feel good about is peddling ‘false hopes.’

“Meanwhile Barack Obama gives his folks the ecstatic experience. ‘They said this day would never come. They said our sights were set too high. They said this country was too divided, disillusioned to ever come together around a common purpose,’ he told them Thursday night, creating a patriotic lump in every throat in the room.

“How could you be 21 and not be for Barack Obama?

“How could you be 53 and not wonder how this relative stranger will hold up when the disasters arrive, when things get truly nasty and the crowd starts seeing him as mortal?

“But if she were around right now, Hillary Rodham the commencement speaker would probably be an Obama girl.”

New Year - American Soulsearching in the Bush Era

As we bring down the curtain on 2007 and take stock in where we stand as a nation at the end of Year Seven in the reign of George W. Bush and the Gang that Couldn't Shoot Straight, it's worth taking a look at today's OpEd page editorial in the New York Times.

In substantial part, the piece, entitled "Looking at America," states:

"There are too many moments these days when we cannot recognize our country. Sunday was one of them, as we read the account in The Times of how men in some of the most trusted posts in the nation plotted to cover up the torture of prisoners by Central Intelligence Agency interrogators by destroying videotapes of their sickening behavior. It was impossible to see the founding principles of the greatest democracy in the contempt these men and their bosses showed for the Constitution, the rule of law and human decency.

"It was not the first time in recent years we’ve felt this horror, this sorrowful sense of estrangement, not nearly. This sort of lawless behavior has become standard practice since Sept. 11, 2001....

"Out of panic and ideology, President Bush squandered America’s position of moral and political leadership, swept aside international institutions and treaties, sullied America’s global image, and trampled on the constitutional pillars that have supported our democracy through the most terrifying and challenging times. These policies have fed the world’s anger and alienation and have not made any of us safer.

"In the years since 9/11, we have seen American soldiers abuse, sexually humiliate, torment and murder prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq. A few have been punished, but their leaders have never been called to account. We have seen mercenaries gun down Iraqi civilians with no fear of prosecution. We have seen the president, sworn to defend the Constitution, turn his powers on his own citizens, authorizing the intelligence agencies to spy on Americans, wiretapping phones and intercepting international e-mail messages without a warrant.

"We have read accounts of how the government’s top lawyers huddled in secret after the attacks in New York and Washington and plotted ways to circumvent the Geneva Conventions — and both American and international law — to hold anyone the president chose indefinitely without charges or judicial review.

"Those same lawyers then twisted other laws beyond recognition to allow Mr. Bush to turn intelligence agents into torturers, to force doctors to abdicate their professional oaths and responsibilities to prepare prisoners for abuse, and then to monitor the torment to make sure it didn’t go just a bit too far and actually kill them.

"The White House used the fear of terrorism and the sense of national unity to ram laws through Congress that gave law-enforcement agencies far more power than they truly needed to respond to the threat — and at the same time fulfilled the imperial fantasies of Vice President Dick Cheney and others determined to use the tragedy of 9/11 to arrogate as much power as they could....

"Prisoners are held [in Guantanamo Bay] with no hope of real justice, only the chance to face a kangaroo court where evidence and the names of their accusers are kept secret, and where they are not permitted to talk about the abuse they have suffered at the hands of American jailers.

"In other foreign lands, the C.I.A. set up secret jails where “high-value detainees” were subjected to ever more barbaric acts, including simulated drowning. These crimes were videotaped, so that “experts” could watch them, and then the videotapes were destroyed, after consultation with the White House, in the hope that Americans would never know.

"The C.I.A. contracted out its inhumanity to nations with no respect for life or law, sending prisoners — some of them innocents kidnapped on street corners and in airports — to be tortured into making false confessions, or until it was clear they had nothing to say and so were let go without any apology or hope of redress.

"These are not the only shocking abuses of President Bush’s two terms in office, made in the name of fighting terrorism. There is much more — so much that the next president will have a full agenda simply discovering all the wrongs that have been done and then righting them.

"We can only hope that this time, unlike 2004, American voters will have the wisdom to grant the awesome powers of the presidency to someone who has the integrity, principle and decency to use them honorably. Then when we look in the mirror as a nation, we will see, once again, the reflection of the United States of America."

More on Tolerance - Walter Isaacson's "Einstein"

More on the topic of tolerance, which I suggest is the core animating principle of the U.S. Constitution in my working book, "Toward a More Tolerant Constitution - Of, By, and For the People"....

From Walter Isaacson's much-lauded new biography on Albert Einstein (another on my holiday wish-list of books):

“[Einstein's] success came from questioning conventional wisdom and marveling at mysteries that struck others as mundane. This led him to embrace a morality and politics based on respect for free minds, free spirits, and free individuals. Tyranny repulsed him, and he saw tolerance not simply as a sweet virtue but as a necessary condition for a creative society. ‘It is important to foster individuality,’ he said, ‘for only the individual can produce new ideas.’…"

On Tolerance: Christopher Hitchens and "God is Not Great"

The title of a book I'm currently working on is (something like) "Toward a More Tolerant Constitution - Of, By, and For the People" basically arguing that governmental TOLERANCE of individual rights is a (if not the) core animating principle of the U.S. Constitution.

In a related context, Christopher Hitchens hits the nail on the head in his 2007 National Book Award finalist, "God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything" (one of my holiday wish-list books):

"[T]he mildest criticism of religion is also the most radical and the most devastating one. Religion is man-made. Even the men who made it cannot agree on what their prophets or redeemers or gurus actually said or did. Still less can they hope to tell us the 'meaning' of later discoveries and developments which were, when they began, either obstructed by their religions or denounced by them.

And yet - the believers still claim to know! Not just to know, but to know everything. Not just to know that god exists, and that he created and supervised the whole enterprise, but also to know what 'he' demands of us - from our diet to our observances to our sexual morality. In other words, in a vast and complicated discussion where we know more and more about less and less, yet can still hope for some enlightenment as we proceed, one faction - itself composed of mutually warring factions - has the sheer arrogance to tell us that we already have all the essential information we need...."

"[F]aith ... is the beginning - but not the end - of all arguments about philosophy, science, history, and human nature. It is also the beginning - but by no means the end - of all disputes about the good life and the just city. Religious faith is, precisely because we are still-evolving creatures, ineradicable. It will never die out, or at least not until we get over our fear of death, and of the dark, and of the unknown, and of each other.

"For this reason, I would not prohibit [religious faith] even if I could. Very generous of me, you may say. But will the religious grant me the same indulgence? I ask because there is a real and serious difference between me and my religious friends, and the real and serious friends are sufficiently honest to admit it. I would be quite content to go to their children's bar mitsvahs, to marvel at their Gothic cathedrals, to 'respect' their belief that the Koran was dictated, though exclusively in Arabic, to an illiterate merchant, or to interest myself in Wicca and Hindu and Jain consolations.

"And as it happens, I will continue to do this without insisting on the polite reciprocal condition - which is that they in turn leave me alone. But this, religion is ultimately incapable of doing. As I write these words, and as you read them, people of faith are in their different ways planning your and my destruction, and the destruction of all the hard-won human attainments.... Religion poisons everything."

How, then, does this passage from Hitchens' new book relate to my own book project? It relates in that the U.S. Constitution was specifically designed as nothing more than a device to prevent others, who claim to know everything under the guise of governmental authority, from destroying all "the hard-won human attainments," whether they be matters of religious freedom of the sort Hitchens speaks, or, more broadly, other precious individual liberties. As Justice Brandeis said in 1928, “The makers of our Constitution … conferred, as against the government, the right to be let alone - the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.”

In other words, so long as my beliefs and actions cause no direct harm to others, the Constitution requires the government to "respect" - i.e., to tolerate - those beliefs and actions; in short, any law, regulation, or other government action that fails to so tolerate me and my beliefs and actions is unconstitutional.

The religious focus of Hitchens' book is relevant as well in light of the increasingly dominant - and inappropriate - role religion has come to play in American politics. For evidence, we need only look so far as the disastrous courses on which our evangelical president has steered the nation largely on the basis of his own religious dead-reckoning; and sadly, if the groveling comments toward the religious right of most of the current presidential candidates are any indication, it appears the situation is not soon to change. If this is so, it will be all the more incumbent upon ordinary Americans to speak out loudly and forcefully in protection of the hard-won constitutional liberties.

Obama the One?

If you're like me it's been hard to get warmed up yet to the presidential campaign, but now with the election less than a year off it's time to start paying closer attention.

In the cover story of the current Dec.2007 issue of The Atlantic, "Why Obama Matters," Andrew Sullivan offers a marvelous perspective on why one candidate, Barack Obama, stands out. Reproduced below are extracts from the article - take a look, see if you agree with Sullivan's persuasive conclusion that "We may in fact have finally found that bridge to the 21st century that Bill Clinton told us about. Its name is Obama."

"Consider this hypothetical," Sullivan says. "It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can."
...
Obama's appeal "has little to do with his policy proposals, which are very close to his Democratic rivals' and which, with a few exceptions, exist firmly within the conventions of our politics. It has little to do with Obama's considerable skills as a conciliator, legislator, or even thinker. It has even less to do with his ideological pedigree or legal background or rhetorical skills."

"Yes, as the many profiles prove, he has considerable intelligence and not a little guile. But so do others, not least his formidably polished and practiced opponent Senator Hillary Clinton."

"Obama, moreover, is no saint. He has flaws and tics: Often tired, sometimes crabby, intermittently solipsistic, he’s a surprisingly uneven campaigner. ...

But "the fundamental point of his candidacy is that it is happening now. In politics, timing matters. And the most persuasive case for Obama has less to do with him than with the moment he is meeting. The moment has been a long time coming, and it is the result of a confluence of events, from one traumatizing war in Southeast Asia to another in the most fractious country in the Middle East. The legacy is a cultural climate that stultifies our politics and corrupts our discourse."

"Obama’s candidacy in this sense is a potentially transformational one. Unlike any of the other candidates, he could take America—finally—past the debilitating, self-perpetuating family quarrel of the Baby Boom generation that has long engulfed all of us. So much has happened in America in the past seven years, let alone the past 40, that we can be forgiven for focusing on the present and the immediate future. But it is only when you take several large steps back into the long past that the full logic of an Obama presidency stares directly—and uncomfortably—at you."

"At its best, the Obama candidacy is about ending a war—not so much the war in Iraq, which now has a mo­mentum that will propel the occupation into the next decade—but the war within America that has prevailed since Vietnam and that shows dangerous signs of intensifying, a nonviolent civil war that has crippled America at the very time the world needs it most. It is a war about war—and about culture and about religion and about race. And in that war, Obama—and Obama alone—offers the possibility of a truce."
...
"This is the critical context for the election of 2008. It is an election that holds the potential not merely to intensify this cycle of division but to bequeath it to a new generation, one marked by a new war that need not be—that should not be—seen as another Vietnam. A Giuliani-Clinton matchup, favored by the media elite, is a classic intragenerational struggle—with two deeply divisive and ruthless personalities ready to go to the brink. Giuliani represents that Nixonian disgust with anyone asking questions about, let alone actively protesting, a war. Clinton will always be, in the minds of so many, the young woman who gave the commencement address at Wellesley, who sat in on the Nixon implosion and who once disdained baking cookies. For some, her husband will always be the draft dodger who smoked pot and wouldn’t admit it. And however hard she tries, there is nothing Hillary Clinton can do about it. She and Giuliani are conscripts in their generation’s war. To their respective sides, they are war heroes."

"In normal times, such division is not fatal, and can even be healthy. It’s great copy for journalists. But we are not talking about routine rancor. And we are not talking about normal times. We are talking about a world in which Islamist terror, combined with increasingly available destructive technology, has already murdered thousands of Americans, and tens of thousands of Muslims, and could pose an existential danger to the West. The terrible failures of the Iraq occupation, the resurgence of al-Qaeda in Pakistan, the progress of Iran toward nuclear capability, and the collapse of America’s prestige and moral reputation, especially among those millions of Muslims too young to have known any American president but Bush, heighten the stakes dramatically."
...
"Of the viable national candidates, only Obama and possibly McCain have the potential to bridge this widening partisan gulf. Polling reveals Obama to be the favored Democrat among Republicans. McCain’s bipartisan appeal has receded in recent years, especially with his enthusiastic embrace of the latest phase of the Iraq War. And his personal history can only reinforce the Vietnam divide. But Obama’s reach outside his own ranks remains striking. Why? It’s a good question: How has a black, urban liberal gained far stronger support among Republicans than the made-over moderate Clinton or the southern charmer Edwards? Perhaps because the Republicans and independents who are open to an Obama candidacy see his primary advantage in prosecuting the war on Islamist terrorism. It isn’t about his policies as such; it is about his person. They are prepared to set their own ideological preferences to one side in favor of what Obama offers America in a critical moment in our dealings with the rest of the world. The war today matters enormously. The war of the last generation? Not so much. If you are an American who yearns to finally get beyond the symbolic battles of the Boomer generation and face today’s actual problems, Obama may be your man. "
...
"The other obvious advantage that Obama has in facing the world and our enemies is his record on the Iraq War. He is the only major candidate to have clearly opposed it from the start. Whoever is in office in January 2009 will be tasked with redeploying forces in and out of Iraq, negotiating with neighboring states, engaging America’s estranged allies, tamping down regional violence. Obama’s interlocutors in Iraq and the Middle East would know that he never had suspicious motives toward Iraq, has no interest in occupying it indefinitely, and foresaw more clearly than most Americans the baleful consequences of long-term occupation. "
...
Moreover, Obama is not so calculated as his opponents: "[H]e is simply less afraid of the right wing than Clinton is, because he has emerged on the national stage during a period of conservative decadence and decline. And so, for example, he felt much freer than Clinton to say he was prepared to meet and hold talks with hostile world leaders in his first year in office. He has proposed sweeping middle-class tax cuts and opposed drastic reforms of Social Security, without being tarred as a fiscally reckless liberal. (Of course, such accusations are hard to make after the fiscal performance of today’s “conservatives.”) Even his more conservative positions—like his openness to bombing Pakistan, or his support for merit pay for public-school teachers—do not appear to emerge from a desire or need to credentialize himself with the right. He is among the first Democrats in a generation not to be afraid or ashamed of what they actually believe, which also gives them more freedom to move pragmatically to the right, if necessary. He does not smell, as Clinton does, of political fear."

"There are few areas where this Democratic fear is more intense than religion. The crude exploitation of sectarian loyalty and religious zeal by Bush and Rove succeeded in deepening the culture war, to Republican advantage. Again, this played into the divide of the Boomer years—between God-fearing Americans and the peacenik atheist hippies of lore. The Democrats have responded by pretending to a public religiosity that still seems strained. Listening to Hillary Clinton detail her prayer life in public, as she did last spring to a packed house at George Washington University, was at once poignant and repellent. Poignant because her faith may well be genuine; repellent because its Methodist genuineness demands that she not profess it so tackily. But she did. The polls told her to."

"Obama, in contrast, opened his soul up in public long before any focus group demanded it. His first book, Dreams From My Father, is a candid, haunting, and supple piece of writing. It was not concocted to solve a political problem (his second, hackneyed book, The Audacity of Hope, filled that niche). It was a genuine display of internal doubt and conflict and sadness. And it reveals Obama as someone whose “complex fate,” to use Ralph Ellison’s term, is to be both believer and doubter, in a world where such complexity is as beleaguered as it is necessary. "
...
"None of this, of course, means that Obama will be the president some are dreaming of. His record in high office is sparse; his performances on the campaign trail have been patchy; his chief rival for the nomination, Senator Clinton, has bested him often with her relentless pursuit of the middle ground, her dogged attention to her own failings, and her much-improved speaking skills. At times, she has even managed to appear more inherently likable than the skinny, crabby, and sometimes morose newcomer from Chicago. Clinton’s most surprising asset has been the sense of security she instills. Her husband—and the good feelings that nostalgics retain for his presidency—have buttressed her case. In dangerous times, popular majorities often seek the conservative option, broadly understood. "
...
In sum, "the paradox is that Hillary makes far more sense if you believe that times are actually pretty good. If you believe that America’s current crisis is not a deep one, if you think that pragmatism alone will be enough to navigate a world on the verge of even more religious warfare, if you believe that today’s ideological polarization is not dangerous, and that what appears dark today is an illusion fostered by the lingering trauma of the Bush presidency, then the argument for Obama is not that strong. Clinton will do. And a Clinton-Giuliani race could be as invigorating as it is utterly predictable."

"But if you sense, as I do, that greater danger lies ahead, and that our divisions and recent history have combined to make the American polity and constitutional order increasingly vulnerable, then the calculus of risk changes. Sometimes, when the world is changing rapidly, the greater risk is caution. Close-up in this election campaign, Obama is unlikely. From a distance, he is necessary. At a time when America’s estrangement from the world risks tipping into dangerous imbalance, when a country at war with lethal enemies is also increasingly at war with itself, when humankind’s spiritual yearnings veer between an excess of certainty and an inability to believe anything at all, and when sectarian and racial divides seem as intractable as ever, a man who is a bridge between these worlds may be indispensable."

What If? A Tale of Two Countries, Pakistan and U.S.

Images out of Pakistan the last few days are striking, with lawyers in business suits hurling tear gas shells back at police and then being rounded up and jailed.

General Pervez Musharraf's declaration of emergency rule last Saturday, including his abolishment of a Supreme Court which has been increasingly critical of his positions on human rights and the validity of his own election, sparked this reaction from the bar. As one prominent Islamabad lawyer, Harvard-educated Babar Sattar, says, "How do you function as a lawyer when the law is what the general says it is?"

And how is Musharraf attempting to justify the imposition of martial law? You guessed it - he needs additional power to combat terrorism.

Sound familiar? America is not the only country with leaders who pander to fear in order to consolidate their power and limit individual rights.

The crucial point is that it's against this sort of autocratic tyranny for which constitutions are built. America's independent judiciary has long reined-in the executive and legislature when they have exceeded their bounds.

Surely if the President of the United States were to claim that he can act beyond the scope of limitations placed upon him by Congress and the Constitution the Supreme Court will slap him down rather than allow him to continue on the path to the sort of tyranny we are now seeing in Pakistan....

Or will it? The positions taken by the newest as well as some of the longer serving members of the U.S. Supreme Court on the issue of Executive Power gives one pause.

If we ever need a reminder on why our Constitution mandates a system of checks and balances, and how very much we depend upon the Supreme Court to prevent the executive from accumulating too much power, we need only look to the images of lawyers at the barricades in Pakistan today, where a powerful executive with a military at his command is making a mockery of the Rule of Law.