The Man who should be President
From Al Gore's speech this Martin Luther King holiday:
A president who breaks the law is a threat to the very structure of our government. Our Founding Fathers were adamant that they had established a government of laws and not men. Indeed, they recognized that the structure of government they had enshrined in our Constitution - our system of checks and balances - was designed with a central purpose of ensuring that it would govern through the rule of law. As John Adams said: "The executive shall never exercise the legislative and judicial powers, or either of them, to the end that it may be a government of laws and not of men."
An executive who arrogates to himself the power to ignore the legitimate legislative directives of the Congress or to act free of the check of the judiciary becomes the central threat that the Founders sought to nullify in the Constitution - an all-powerful executive too reminiscent of the King from whom they had broken free. In the words of James Madison, "the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny."
Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country. As we drift, purposefully, toward the next war in Iran, and toward the loss of liberty at home, we must call upon the Congress to fulfill its duty to be a check and balance upon the Executive. This is not an issue of the Left--I respect honest and principled conservatives--would that there were some in the Bush administration. Let us hope there are some in the Congress and the Judiciary.
