Last month, Republican Congressional
leaders filed into the Oval Office to meet with President George W. Bush and
talk about renewing the controversial USA Patriot Act.
Several provisions
of the act, passed in the shell shocked period immediately following the 9/11
terrorist attacks, caused enough anger that liberal groups like the American
Civil Liberties Union had joined forces with prominent conservatives like
Phyllis Schlafly and Bob Barr to oppose renewal.
GOP leaders told Bush
that his hardcore push to renew the more onerous provisions of the act could
further alienate conservatives still mad at the President from his botched
attempt to nominate White House Counsel Harriet Miers to the Supreme
Court.
“I don’t give a goddamn,” Bush retorted. “I’m the President and
the Commander-in-Chief. Do it my way.”
“Mr. President,” one aide in the
meeting said. “There is a valid case that the provisions in this law undermine
the Constitution.”
“Stop throwing the Constitution in my face,” Bush
screamed back. “It’s just a goddamned piece of paper!”
I’ve talked to
three people present for the meeting that day and they all confirm that the
President of the United States called the Constitution “a goddamned piece of
paper.”
And, to the Bush Administration, the Constitution of the United
States is little more than toilet paper stained from all the shit that this
group of power-mad despots have dumped on the freedoms that “goddamned piece of
paper” used to guarantee.
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, while still
White House counsel, wrote that the “Constitution is an outdated
document.”
Put aside, for a moment, political affiliation or personal
beliefs. It doesn’t matter if you are a Democrat, Republican or Independent. It
doesn’t matter if you support the invasion or Iraq or not. Despite our
differences, the Constitution has stood for two centuries as the defining
document of our government, the final source to determine “in the end ” if
something is legal or right.
Every federal official - including the
President - who takes an oath of office swears to uphold and defend the
Constitution of the United States.”
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia
says he cringes when someone calls the Constitution a “living
document.”
“Oh, how I hate the phrase we have “a ‘living document,”ť
Scalia says. “We now have a Constitution that means whatever we want it to mean.
The Constitution is not a living organism, for Pete’s sake.”
As a judge,
Scalia says, “I don’t have to prove that the Constitution is perfect; I just
have to prove that it’s better than anything else.”
President Bush has
proposed seven amendments to the Constitution over the last five years,
including a controversial amendment to define marriage as a “union between a man
and woman.” Members of Congress have proposed some 11,000 amendments over the
last decade, ranging from repeal of the right to bear arms to a Constitutional
ban on abortion.
Scalia says the danger of tinkering with the
Constitution comes from a loss of rights.
“We can take away rights just
as we can grant new ones,”ť Scalia warns. “Don’t think that it’s a one-way
street.”
And don’t buy the White House hype that the USA Patriot Act is a
necessary tool to fight terrorism. It is a dangerous law that infringes on the
rights of every American citizen and, as one brave aide told President Bush,
something that undermines the Constitution of the United States.
