BUSH'S
PLEBISCITARY PRESIDENCY
House of Representatives - Congressional Record - July
13, 2006
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's
announced policy of January 4, 2005, the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr.
Frank) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority
leader.
Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Speaker, to
begin, I want to express my appreciation for the remarks of the gentleman
from North Carolina who just spoke with regard to his call for oversight. It
has been sorely lacking, and it is relevant to the point I want to make
today.
Mr. Speaker, I meet, as we all do, with
people in my district and people elsewhere in the country, and I have for a
couple of years now been engaged in some debate with some of my liberal
friends on the nature of our disagreements with this administration. And up
until a few months ago, my argument was that we should focus on those policy
issues where we disagreed, and there were many: the war in Iraq; an economic
policy that undercuts working people, that promotes inequality; policies
that weaken the environment; policies that undercut the rights of
minorities.
Others have said, no, we have to go beyond
that. We have to indict this administration for his whole philosophy of
governing and people have questioned its commitment to democracy. I continue
to disagree that we should question this administration's commitment to
democracy.
Some of the words that get thrown around,
authoritarianism and worse should not be used lightly. This remains today,
in the sixth year of the Bush Presidency, a very free country. People are
free to speak out, to dissent. People are free to be critical. So while I
agree that this administration believes in democracy in the broadest sense,
I am now convinced that it is a very different kind of democracy than that
which has prevailed for most of our history, and which I think is the
preferable form.
Yes, the President agrees that the source
morally or the power of the government is an election, and he believes that
the President ought to be elected. I will turn a little later to questions
that have been raised about the integrity of the election process. And I
think enough doubt has been raised so that we need to do more to reassure
people that we are committed to protecting that integrity.
But let me take the President at his word
now. After the election, he said, okay I have been elected. I agree that the
President honors the concept that you gain power in a democratic society by
winning the election. But here is the difference.
We have historically talked about our
checks, about balances, about our three branches of government. We have
contrasted that to the more unitary governments in other parts of the world,
even democratic ones. We have a separate legislative and a separate
independent judiciary and the executive branch.
We have talked, from the beginning of this
country, in the debates over ratification of the Constitution, about the
benefits of checks and balances. This is an administration which considers
checks and balances to be a hindrance to effective governance. This is an
administration that believes that democracy consists essentially of electing
a President every 4 years and subsequently entrusting to that President
almost all of the important decisions.
Now, given the role of Congress, the
administration, which I believe deeply holds this view, articulated most
consistently and forcefully by the Vice President, they could not have
succeeded in imposing it on this country and its Constitution as much as
they have without the acquiescence of this Congress.
And that is why I appreciated what the
previous speaker, the gentleman from North Carolina, talked about, the need
for oversight. I believe we have seen an overreaching by the President. I
believe we have seen a seizing of power that should not have been seized by
the executive branch. But executive overreaching could not have succeeded as
much as it has without congressional dereliction of duty.
I hope that some of the signs I am now
seeing of resistance finally in Congress to that will take seed. But I do
not see that yet. What we have is a President who won the election in 2004,
was declared the winner of the election in 2000, much more dubiously. You
know, in some ways President Bush was lucky that there was this flap over
the votes in Florida. Because that obscured the fact that George Bush became
President of the United States, after the election of 2000, trailing his
major opponent by a larger popular vote than anybody in American history.
If you assume that Florida was counted 100
percent accurately, a very hard assumption to make, George Bush still fell
half a million votes behind Al Gore, the fact that he was a minority
President, that is with Ralph Nader drawing off 3 million, while Pat
Buchanan only drew off a half a million.
But despite that, George Bush took over
because of all of the attention had been on Florida. But from then on, he
took the position that as President, he was, as he later articulated it, the
``decider.'' That is not a word that you find often in American history.
Yeah, the President is a very influential and very powerful person. But he
is not the single decider. He is the most important in a system of multiple
sources of power.
But thanks to the acquiescence of a
Republican majority in this Congress, driven in part by ideological
sympathy, he has been allowed to be the decider. So we have had a very
different kind of American Government. We have had an American Government in
which the President gets elected and exercises an extraordinary amount of
power. It is democracy, but it is closer to plebiscitary democracy than it
is to the traditional democracy of America.
Plebiscitary democracy, political scientists
use to describe those systems wherein a leader is elected, but once elected
has almost all of the power. Indeed, I believe, it certainly would seem to
me the aspirations of the Vice President, that in some ways the approach of
this administration to governance interestingly has more in common with that
of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela than almost anybody else.
Elect the President. Let him win and then
get out of his way. Now, this has become clear to me in recent months. We
had a debate here a month ago on the floor of this House on the right of the
President to ignore legislation passed 30 years ago, the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act, by which the President and Congress together
set forward a method for wiretapping and eavesdropping in cases where we
thought there were foreign threats to the U.S.
This is a case where the President and
Congress together, in the Carter administration, explicitly adopted a scheme
to listen in on people who meant us ill. It was followed by Presidents from
Jimmy Carter through Ronald Reagan and George Bush and Bill Clinton. And
then this President said, no, I do not like that. That is too confining, so
I will ignore it. And I will instead use my power to do what I want to do
and forget the requirements of the law, that is, he was doing here exactly
what the law talked about doing in terms of goal, but ignored the method
that the law set forward.
What Congress had decided with Presidential
approval became irrelevant. Now, we debated that on the floor. And this
really began to crystallize for me. And defenders of the President,
opponents of our rule that said you cannot spend money to do this
wiretapping in violation of the law, for the same thing the law calls for.
You know, it is one thing if the President
says, well, there is no law here, I have got to do what I need to do. That
is dubious and we can get to it. But where the law has been set out in a
prescribed constitutional manner as to how you do something, and the
President says I am not going to do it that way, I will do it my way, then
you are into plebiscitary democracy. Then you are into the democracy that
says no checks and balances. No, Congress, I will do what I think necessary.
Now, I wondered about the constitutional
authority. And it was cited on the floor, what is called the ``vesting
clause'' of the Constitution. And I thought, gee, that is a pretty important
clause apparently; it gives him all that power. How come I do not remember
it better?
So I went and relooked it up. Here is what
it says:
``The executive power shall be vested in a
President of the United States of America.'' That is it. That is the vesting
clause. From those words the President and his defenders draw the conclusion
that the President can ignore a duly enacted law of Congress if he thinks it
should be done a different way.
Well, this is of course totally circular. It
is a perfect tautology. It says: ``The executive power should be vested in
the President of the United States.'' It does not say what the executive
powers are. It does say, yeah, the President is the boss of the Secretary of
the Treasury or the Secretary of State, but it does not define executive
power.
So what they have done is take a simple
sentence that says the President is the boss of the executive and use that
then to justify the insertion or the assertion of executive power in areas
which should have been legislative or judicial. And that has been the
pattern in this administration.
In 2001, I voted for a resolution, the
authorization of use of force in Afghanistan. You know, when my Republican
friends, and some of the other Republicans talk about how Democrats will not
stand up to terrorism, I am struck by how they forget the war in
Afghanistan. I voted to go to war in Afghanistan because that was the place
from which Osama bin Laden attacked us.
Almost everybody, only one dissenter out of
hundreds of Democrats, voted to go to war in Afghanistan. In fact, I wish we
were doing a better job in Afghanistan. I wish the misguided and mistaken
war in Iraq was not driving attention, taking attention away from the war in
Afghanistan.
But I voted for the war in Afghanistan. I
voted for the authorization to use force. It said in there, and it was
unfortunately the model here where the Republicans draft up a resolution and
put it through in a way that cannot be amended and only has 20 or 30 minutes
to discuss on each side, it said the President may take all necessary
actions in this regard.
Well, all of us who voted for it thought we
were voting to authorize a war against Afghanistan if necessary to get Osama
bin Laden. The Taliban was given the option of giving him up; they would not
do it. We later found the President citing that as authority to order the
arrest of American citizens on American soil who would then be held
indefinitely in prison with no formal charges brought against them and no
opportunity to defend themselves and no way to get out of prison.
That was one of the cases in Chicago where
they arrested a man in Chicago, he is an American citizen, they said he was
up to no good. He may well have been up to no good, although ultimately they
did not even prosecute him. But they arrested him and said they had the
right to just lock him up forever, an American citizen with no recourse of
any kind because the President ordered it.
Well, there is a statute that says you
cannot in America lock up an American without statutory justification. And
people said, where is the statutory justification? And the administration
said, and was maintaining it until the Supreme Court majority in the Hamdan
case finally repudiated it, well, it said right there in 2001, Congress
authorized the President to do whatever he had to do to deal with the
situation of the attack in America. And that outrageously, illogically was
cited as support for this.
But it was in defense of this notion that
the President could do whatever he wants whenever he wants to. Now some have
argued, well, the President can do anything unless he is explicitly told he
cannot. Not in this administration. They believe the President can do
anything he wants, even if he is told he can't. That has certainly been the
case in national security.
It struck me when we recently dealt with the
tracking of terrorist financing that the administration had done this with
virtually no congressional cooperation. Now, the statute calls for them to
be briefing Members of Congress. We all have seen the record of briefing.
This program started late in 2001. They
briefed two people early in 2002, when the program was just starting. They
briefed one person in 2003. They briefed nobody in 2004. And they briefed
two people in 2005, and nobody for the first 4 months of 2006. Then they
learned that the newspapers were going to print it, so after they knew it
was going to become public, then they briefed 23 other people.
I was one of those offered a briefing. I
turned it down because of the circumstances. They told me that they were
going to tell me something that was a secret, when they told me, but was
pretty soon not going to be a secret, but if they told it to me, I had to
keep it a secret even if it was no longer a secret. So I said, never mind.
But I asked the Treasury Department, why are
you briefing me after the fact that it was going to become public? They
said, as a courtesy. Well, that sums it up. You know, the process of
briefing Members of Congress is supposed to be part of the constitutional
mandate for collaboration. It does not come from Miss Manners; it comes from
the Constitution. It is not a courtesy; it is a requirement of collaborative
government.
It is a chance to get back and forth about
things. And it struck me, Congress would have clearly ratified their right
to do the terrorist financing. Congress would almost certainly have given
them a lot of the power they wanted with regard to the detainees in
Guantanamo, perhaps more than I wanted to.
You know, we had the PATRIOT Act situation
where the Judiciary Committee on which I then sat unanimously adopted a very
reasonable, balanced bill which gave law enforcement full powers, expanded
powers in the nature of what you needed to fight terrorism, but had some
safeguards against abuse.
And that bill, having unanimously passed the
Committee on the Judiciary, was reported by the Rules Committee. And the
Attorney General, acting for the President, said, no, we do not like that
bill. Here is a new one. And a new bill was written overnight and debated on
the floor of the House with no ability to amend it.
So I didn't like that and voted against it.
It showed that Congress was ready to do what the administration wanted. But
even knowing that it could probably get from this rather supine Congress
whatever they wanted, they haven't wanted Congress to do it.
It strikes me as to why: They don't want
Congress to agree on their ability to detain people at Guantanamo or track
terrorist financing or do a lot of other things, because accepting the right
of Congress to agree with them implies that at some future date Congress
might disagree. And the theory of plebiscitary democracy has no room for
congressional disagreement once the President has made his decision. So we
have a situation of unilateralism and a refusal even to take Congress in
when Congress wants to be a willing partner.
Now, there are a couple of problems with
that. First of all, I voted for the balanced PATRIOT Act. I believe that the
law enforcement people are the good guys and women. I believe that we need
to give them new powers when we are dealing with murderous fanatics who are
ready to kill themselves. Our basic law enforcement theory of deterrence
doesn't work against people who are ready to commit suicide, although that
didn't stop us from authorizing the death penalty for suicide bombers a few
years ago.
But I believe that the law enforcement
people are the good guys, but I don't think they are the perfect guys. I
think there were mistakes that were made by the FBI in Boston, outrageous
mistakes. I think of Mayfield in Oregon, Captain Yee at Guantanamo, Wen Ho
Lee under the Clinton administration, a number of cases in Guantanamo of
innocent people captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan because of the
fog of war.
People make mistakes. What we should be
doing is giving law enforcement full power, but also having some checks so
that people who are unfairly accused can defend themselves and prove their
innocence. Our problem is that when the administration does these things
unilaterally, we have no way to know whether or not those safeguards are
there. When the administration asserts the right to arrest American citizens
on American soil, which happened, this is not a hypothetical, and lock that
man up forever, fortunately the Supreme Court said, ``no,'' you can't do
this, this is America. But when they assert that, the problem is not that
they are being tough on terrorists, it is that they are being tough on an
individual who is accused of terrorism who has no conceivable way to defend
themselves to say that there might have been a mistake.
Shutting out the Congress means that you
think you are perfect, that you think you can do these things, that you can
exercise these extraordinary powers and you don't need anybody to say, wait
a minute, maybe you should do it this way or that way.
And, by the way, I do not think the argument
is, well, we can't trust the Congress. I am not familiar with any pattern of
Members of Congress divulging information or leaking. Frankly, the great
majority of leaks I have seen in the 26 years I have been here have come
from the executive branch, not from the Congress. They were leaks because of
some policy dispute and somebody wants to leverage somebody else, and that
includes leaks from the Bush administration when they thought it would help
them make the case with Iraq, like Douglas Feith and others.
But the problem of shutting Congress out is
that you don't get that input that allows you to exercise powers in a
reasonable way, but helps you with safeguards.
In fact, what happens is this. You have
things which are not, in themselves, controversial like tracking terrorist
financing. Of course we should be doing that
Or surveilling foreign terrorists or wire
tapping, of course, with the right reasons, you should do that. But when the
administration does them unilaterally and refuses to allow Congress in and
refuses to follow some of the rules that Congress has set down, they take
noncontroversial things or less controversial things and make them
controversial. That is when things become politicized. The debate over the
terrorist financing tracking is not over the substance of that program, but
over the secretive and unilateral and arrogant way in which the
administration decided to do it and shut out any chance for Congress to
participate.
So that is the problem with the plebiscitary
approach. Yes, you elect a President and he is supposed to take the lead,
but we don't elect perfect Presidents. You elect people who are important.
And then we also have a Congress and a court that are supposed to be
involved as well; and this administration has time and again refused to do
that.
Now, it has been especially the case in
areas of national security where, with ignoring the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act, or not briefing anybody seriously over terrorist
financing, or taking the authorization of the use of force in Afghanistan
and bending it way out of shape to make it a universal mandate to do things
that no one thought it was supposed to be used for. Or arresting American
citizens and holding them forever, arguing that you could do that without
any court ever being involved. Having no process by which people innocently
caught up in the fog of war in Afghanistan could say, wait a minute, I am
not a terrorist, I am just some poor guy wandering around here. But they
have also done it domestically.
One of the things this administration has
used more than every other administration in history is the right, when
signing a bill, a right that they claim to sign a bill, the Constitution
says Congress passes a bill, the President can either veto it or sign it.
And they say, okay, here is the deal, we will sign it, but when we sign it,
we will say that we are really signing these parts and not the other parts,
because we consider some of it unconstitutional, so we will ignore it. That
is a wholly unconstitutional approach.
The President has a right to say, this is
unconstitutional, I don't like it. His job then is to veto the bill. But
what he does is he picks and chooses; he thinks the legislation is a
supermarket. He walks in, he takes some from here, some from there, he
discards what he doesn't like. That is not appropriate.
That is in the domestic area. The signing
statements are an assertion of the plebiscitary power in the domestic area
that we have seen in the international area, the right of the President to
do whatever he wants, to take laws that Congress passed and pay attention to
parts of them and not other parts.
There are other examples of this. The
Constitution does give the President the right to make recess appointments,
but this President has abused that. They are to be used, it seems to me, in
unusual circumstances. This President has regularly appointed people to
office and to high court seats who couldn't have won confirmation in Senates
controlled by his own party. The pattern of recess appointments is a very,
very serious one.
You also see it with regard to the people he
appoints, because what they have argued is not just that Congress shouldn't
be that powerful, but it is the unitary theory of the President. I was
frankly surprised when I first came across the unitary theory of the
President. I had not been aware of the schizophrenic theory of the
Presidency or the notion of the twin Presidencies. But what we have seen in
this administration, frankly, is a downgrading of public officials other
than the President.
You know, one of the great positions in
American history has been Secretary of the Treasury. Very distinguished,
important people have been Secretary of the Treasury. It has been a very
important part of a system in which various segments in this society
participate in discussions. James Baker and Robin Rubin recently, George
Schultz, a large body of very impressive Secretaries of the Treasury. Under
this Presidency, we have a new one coming in, we can't judge him, but two
very distinguished men, John Snow and Paul O'Neill were appointed Secretary
of the Treasury, and ignored, belittled by the President's staff.
What we have again is the assertion that a
President gets elected and essentially is the decider in ways that really go
contrary to the notion of participation by other segments.
Yes, it is true you win an election and you
gain some power. This is a very big, very complex country. It really is not
a good idea for one individual, even one who was legitimately elected in an
election in which there was no contest, and we certainly didn't have that in
2000, to be the decider, to diminish input from others.
Now, again, I have to reiterate that this
could not have happened without the collaboration of a supine Congress.
Never in American history has Congress been so willing to give away its
constitutional function. I know people have said, well, what do you expect,
it is a Republican President and a Republican Congress. That is what
happens. No, the history of the United States is that even when the same
party controlled the Presidency and the Congress, Congress did oversight.
Harry Truman, and people said, well, it is a
war, what do you expect? Harry Truman became a national figure when he
chaired a Senate committee in a Senate in which the Democrats were a
majority, supervising closely the conduct of World War II by the Departments
of War and Navy under Franklin Roosevelt. Can you imagine what a Halliburton
would have been subjected to in World War II given that Harry Truman was
there?
And efforts by this Congress, by my
colleague from Massachusetts, Mr. Tierney, to institute such a
committee, the efforts of our colleague from California, Mr. Waxman,
to do oversight, they have been rejected by this Congress. So this Congress
has not done oversight.
Let's take a more recent example. When Bill
Clinton was President for the first 2 years and the Democrats were in the
majority, we had a very tough, emotionally searing hearing doing oversight
on Waco. We had a hearing in the Banking Committee on Whitewater.
Republicans thought it wasn't sufficiently condemnatory, but they got a
chance to present witnesses; we had the hearing. It is only with the
exception of President Bush and this Republican Congress that we have seen a
collapse of the oversight function because members of the Republican Party
belonging essentially to the same very conservative ideological faction that
now controls the Republican Party as the President, has decided that
partisan solidarity, and ideological solidarity even more, trump
constitutional obligations.
So we have seen no oversight. That has
played into the hands of the plebiscitary Presidency, into the hands of a
President who is allowed more power than is healthy for a society.
And I reiterate, I am not charging
authoritarianism. It still is a free country, and I encourage people to use
that freedom and to be critical and to organize. But we are still talking
about a very, very different mode of governance, the mode of governance in
which, instead of the checks and balances and the collaboration and the
input of a lot of people, you get one man making the decisions.
Now, I understand that democracy can be
messy and it is not always neat, but we have not before this had an
executive branch that considered it to be more of a nuisance than anything
else. I believe that that is the attitude of the Vice President, and he has
a major influence on the President, and they really regard things like
checks and balances and judicial review and the role of the media as
interference with their ability to govern.
Now, we do face a terrorist enemy. And if in
fact these things detracted from our ability to defend ourselves, we would
have a real dilemma, but they don't. The argument that democracy, that
collaboration with the Congress, that judicial review, that an independent
media, that these somehow detract from our ability to defend ourselves is
not only morally flawed, it is factually wrong. This Congress would be very
willing to participate with the President. And I think if a collaborative
process in which thoughtful and well-informed Members of Congress who have
gotten expertise in this and that area were able to meet in a collaborative
way with members of the administration, the result would be to strengthen
what we do. Instead, what we have is controversy after controversy after
controversy because this administration does not learn, and they continue to
follow the pattern of we will do it unilaterally, we do it without anybody
else, we will do whatever we want. And it fails.
I talked before, and I just want to
elaborate the constitutional point about the President ignoring the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act. My colleagues, when they defend the
President, cite certain Supreme Court decisions. They never cite Youngstown
Sheet and Tube against Sawyer, the steel case. In that case, the Court made
a very important point, which is that there are sort of three situations in
which you can talk about Presidential power. You can talk about cases where
the President and Congress act together, and there the court said, you know
what, that is when America is at its strongest.
That is the point I want to make.
Constitutionally, our ability as a government to assert our power, to
protect ourselves, to mobilize our resources is strongest when the President
and Congress work together. It is strongest constitutionally and it is
strongest politically and in every other way.
Then, the Court said there is the area where
Congress hasn't said anything. Well, maybe the President can do it, maybe he
can't. But the Court also said, but you know, and when Congress has said, do
it this way, the President has no right to ignore it. Well, that is of
course what they did in FISA.
Now, people have legitimately said to me,
well, if that is the case, if they are violating some constitutional
principles, why aren't they stopped? Because of the nature of our judicial
system, it is very hard to bring a case before the U.S. Supreme Court. You
have to have what is called standing; there has to be a specific controversy
that affects you in a very particular way. This administration has exploited
that. They abuse power in ways that they know cannot be brought before the
courts. When they are brought before the courts from time to time, they
lose, and they have lost most of the decisions before the U.S. Supreme Court
about their exertion of extraordinary power. The problem is that they are
able to exert that power and get away with it in some cases.
There is only one way for sure that an
administration can be restrained from ignoring constitutional limitations
and have that brought to court. That is if this Congress passes an
appropriations amendment which says none of the money being voted here can
be used for this or that or the other. That is the only way Congress can
restrain a President from sending troops into battle, which was done in
Nicaragua, although somewhat ignored by Reagan, but essentially it was
obeyed. And, Angola and Vietnam. Only if this Congress says none of the
funds appropriated herein shall be used for X will the Court enforce that.
And we came close a little while ago where a majority on our side and a few
on the other side said, no, let's tell them they can't ignore the FISA. But
a majority of the House, overwhelmingly Republican, wouldn't go along. That
is where the congressional dereliction of duty comes in.
Presidents can get away with this assertion
of extra constitutional authority. Congress doesn't have to give them the
authority; all it has to do is not stop them. That is what we have done. And
that is a terrible mistake, whether it is domestic or international.
And I want to repeat, with regard to
national security, the problem is in many cases not what the administration
has done, but the way in which they have done it.
Yes, this is a Congress overwhelmingly ready
to give them the power to combat terrorism. We, almost all of us, understood
after September 11 of 2001 that we needed a new law enforcement mode in
which we got more aggressive, that simply deterring people by the threat of
punishment doesn't work in an era of suicidal fanatics. But this
administration saw this as a chance to vindicate this theory, I think, of
plebiscitary democracy that says that democracy means, you elect me and then
you get out of my way; and checks and balances and congressional oversight
and media scrutiny, these are all interferences. And, again, there is no
basis for arguing that these will stop us from going forward.
One of the arguments we got was, we can't
use the court system. We have bad people here, and if we go to the court
system, it won't work. Well, it has worked. John Walker Lynn was convicted,
Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, was convicted. Moussawi was convicted.
The courts have been unfairly maligned by
this administration. We have been able to convict people. Given the record
of the courts, there is no justification to asserting your right to lock up
an American citizen whenever you want to on your say-so and have no judicial
process available to that individual whatsoever. Again, thanks to an 8-1
Supreme Court decision, that is no longer the case, but that was part of the
assertion. That is part of the power that they are asserting.
So whether it is signing statements or
misuse of the authorization of use of force in Afghanistan, or refusal to
talk to Members of Congress on things, or exploiting the fact that it is
very hard to get judicial decisions, all of these things come together in a
pattern. That is why I say, I acknowledge now that when I told friends over
these past couple of years that we should just go policy issue by policy
issue and not talk about the overall framework of governance, I was wrong.
It is now clear to me there is a pattern to
this administration's actions, and it is one that rejects not democracy, but
the democracy of checks and balances and participation and cooperation and
collaboration that we have long known; and it substitutes the democracy of
the plebiscite, the democracy of the strong man who gets elected and is then
allowed to go forward without interference. And I think that is wrong both
from a philosophical standpoint and also from a practical standpoint.
I think the insistence of this
administration to doing it by themselves and by rejecting efforts to draw in
other sectors of this society weakens America and doesn't strengthen it,
that it makes things look more controversial than they need to be.
Now, there have recently been some stirrings
here. I was very struck when we had a hearing of the Financial Services
Committee, the Subcommittee on Oversight, of the strong and articulate voice
of the chair of that subcommittee, the gentlewoman from New York (Mrs.
Kelly), who objected to the unilateralism of it. There were some other
showings in the Senate. Some Senators have said, no, you can't just ignore
what the Supreme Court did and you can't just put a little lipstick on this
and forget about it.
I wish the administration would understand
that what we are talking about is strengthening America, not weakening it;
that the democracy we have had, the checks and balances, they weren't
suspended during World War II. People made mistakes during World War II, the
relocation of the Japanese and others. Yes, those were terrible mistakes,
but you had the Truman Committee and you had a very active Congress.
We have not in any previous emergency felt
the need to go from the America of our Constitution to a model of a strong
man elected and all power ceded to him. And I hope, though I doubt very much
this administration plans to change its approach to this, but I hope that
what we are seeing now is a willingness on the part of the Congress to
assert the constitutional role of the Congress; not to be obstructionist,
certainly not for partisanship because the Republicans control both Houses,
but in recognition that an America which functions as it was intended to
function, in a way in which the branches cooperate and correct each other
and improve each other and work together, we are of a common goal, certainly
in the area of national security.
We believe, many of us, that a process in
which we work together will yield a better result; that a process which
assumes that law enforcement is perfect and therefore can operate in
secrecy, without any kind of input, that that will do more harm than good
compared to what the alternative would be. Not more harm than good overall,
but less good than you could otherwise do.
I believe there is a very strong majority in
this Congress prepared to work with this administration in ways that
preserve the need for discretion and in which the expertise collectively in
this body on a number of issues can help us go forward with the measures we
need to protect ourselves and, at the same time, preserve our liberties. And
if this administration continues the pattern of these past years, it will
damage our ability to come together and make this effort, and I think, over
the long term, diminish the nature of our democracy, because the democracy
of the plebiscite meets minimal democratic standards, but it does not
represent the full richness of a democracy in which all can participate.
Now, my last point is this. Especially for
this administration, with its focus on the election of the strong man, there
needs to be better recognition of the widespread unhappiness about the
electoral process. The election of 2000 clearly was a shambles.
Go back to the mob in Florida. You know, we
have the man who has been declared to be ahead in Mexico, Calderon,
predicting that Obrador, who is challenging the result, will muster a mob
and they will march. Well, he might have been describing the Republicans in
Florida in 2000, when a mob intimidated people against counting the votes.
And we had a Supreme Court opinion which did
not meet the minimum standards, it seems to me, of legitimacy when they
said, okay, the Republicans win this one, but please don't pay any attention
to this in future races.
Given this administration's view that
elections are all you need, it is all the more important for them to
understand that we need to reassure the country that elections are fully,
fairly conducted. I do not understand why people confident of their mandate,
confident of their ability to win would object to some of the things that
have been put forward to reassure people that the votes are counted as they
are cast.
The worst you could say about that is that
it would be a little unnecessary. An administration that spends money the
way this one does can't really think that is a financial problem. And we
have had examples of votes miscounted. We understand the vulnerability of
machines to tinkering. There is no justification for continuing to fail to
adopt safeguards for the counting of votes that will reassure people.
Mr. Speaker, the democracy we have had, the
checks and balances, the back and forth, Congress being an interference from
the standpoint of the executive, in some cases, strong-minded executives,
clashing with the President, maybe being fired trying to get support in
Congress, a very assertive media, we have had those for a long time, and we
are the strongest country in the world. It is very hard to argue from
history that these factors weaken us.
What we have is an administration that is
radically trying to change the nature of our democracy. They want to
simplify it, they want to neaten it. Democracy is not good when it is neat,
certainly not in a country as vast as this one. No single individual, no
matter how popular, can embody all of the wisdom and all of the values of
the country.
The democracy we have evolved of full
participation isn't always convenient for those of us in power, it isn't
always as quick as people would like, but it has proven over time to be
effective, and it could be not only effective today, but even more effective
in our collective self-defense than the current model, which produces
controversy where none is called for and division where we could have unity.
I am not optimistic that we will change the
approach of this administration. But I do hope, Mr. Speaker, that our
colleagues in this Congress will continue what I think are stirrings of
change and reassert our historic role and restore the kind of messy and
inconvenient and much better and more inclusive democracy that has been our
country's legacy.
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