Choice America Network

As we close the year 2005, with war still raging in Iraq and lies still emanating from the White House, let’s send out some positive vibes for the new year. In the spirit of planting our own “field of dreams"…

Imagine if, in 2006:

• Every citizen against the war decides to attend a peace vigil.
• Every mother shows up at a recruiters' office and says, "NOT MY CHILD!"
• Every father is brave enough to tell his son "Killing is NOT manly."
• Every teacher teaches conflict resolution to her students.
• Every Christian demands that our government practice the Commandment: THOU SHALL NOT KILL.
• Every anti-war voter refuses to give money, support or votes to pro-war candidates.
• Every student who considers joining the military to pay rising college costs instead joins with other students to demand affordable education.
• Every soldier who has doubts about the mission in Iraq refuses to fight.
• Every congressperson walks, cycles or takes public transportation to work.
• Every American buying a new car chooses a hybrid or biodiesel.
• Every family member of a fallen soldier joins Cindy Sheehan in saying “Honor our sacrifices; stop the killing.”
• Every living veteran, those who best know the agony of war, converges on Washington to demand a Department of Peace.
• Every woman who wants to see a more peaceful world connects with like-minded women of all ages, races, religions and nationalities to demand an end to war. *
• Every citizen who feels lied to about the reasons for invading Iraq demands that George Bush be impeached.

Maybe, together, we could end the occupation of Iraq in the new year and make it harder for future leaders to drag us into unjust wars. When we sow seeds of peace, a whole field of dreams can blossom.

From your sisters at CODEPINK, we wish you a joyful holiday season and look forward to working together in 2006 to make our dreams come true.

Medea Benjamin is Founding Director of Global Exchange. For over twenty years, Medea has supported human rights and social justice struggles around the world. Medea is a leading activist in the peace movement and helped bring together the groups forming the coalition United for Peace and Justice . She is also the co-founder of CODEPINK: Women for Peace, a women's group that has been organizing creative actions against the war and occupation of Iraq. CODEPINK is pushing for a reorientation of budget priorities in the US to focus on heath care, education and housing, not war. Code Pink now has over 250 chapters throughout the United States.

CHOICE AMERICA NETWORK

In 1998, House Majority Whip Tom DeLay, currently under indictment on corruption charges, proclaimed: "This nation sits at a crossroads. One direction points to the higher road of the rule of law...The other road is the path of least resistance" in which "we pitch the law completely overboard when the mood fits us...[and] close our eyes to the potential lawbreaking...and tear an unfixable hole in our legal system." That arbiter of moral politics was incensed about the possibility of Bill Clinton escaping unpunished for his "crimes."

Fast forward to December 2005. Not one official in the entire Bush Administration has been fired or indicted, not to mention impeached, for the shedding of American blood in Iraq or for the shredding of our Constitution at home. As Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter put it--hours after the New York Times reported that Bush had authorized NSA wiretapping of US citizens without judicial warrants--this President has committed a real transgression that "goes beyond sex, corruption and political intrigue to big issues like security versus liberty and the reasonable bounds of presidential power."

In the last months, several organizations, including AfterDowningStreet, Impeach Central and ImpeachPAC.org, have formed to urge Bush's impeachment. But until very recently, their views were virtually absent in the so-called "liberal" MSM, and could only be found on the Internet and in street protests.

But the times they are a' changin'. The I-word has moved from the marginal to the mainstream--although columnists like Charles "torture-is-fine-by-me" Krauthammer would like us to believe that "only the most brazen and reckless and partisan" could support the idea. In fact, as Michelle Goldberg reports in Salon, "in the past few days, impeachment "has become a topic of considered discussion among constitutional scholars and experts (including a few Republicans), former intelligence officers, and even a few politicians." Even a moderately liberal columnist like Newsweek's Alter sounds like The Nation, observing: "We're seeing clearly now that Bush thought 9/11 gave him license to act like a dictator."

As Editor & Publisher recently reported, the idea of impeaching Bush has entered the mainstream media's circulatory system--with each day producing more op-eds and articles on the subject. Joining the chorus on Christmas Eve, conservative business magazine Barron's published a lengthy editorial excoriating the president for committing a potentially impeachable offense. "If we don't discuss the program and lack of authority of it," wrote Barron's editorial page editor Thomas Donlan, "we are meeting the enemy--in the mirror."

Public opinion is also growing more comfortable with the idea of impeaching this president. A Zogby International poll conducted this summer found that 42 percent of Americans felt that impeaching Bush would be justified if it was shown that he had manipulated intelligence in going to war in Iraq. (John Zogby admitted that "it was much higher than I expected.") By November, the number of those who favored impeaching Bush stood at 53 percent--if it was in fact proven that Bush had lied about the basis for invading Iraq. (And these polls were taken before the revelations of Bush's domestic spying.)

For those interested in some of the most compelling charges against the president, I offer a brief summary:

• Former Nixon White House counsel John Dean argued in his aptly-named book Worse than Watergate that Bush's false statements about WMDs in Iraq--used to drum up support for an invasion--deceived the American people and Congress. This constituted "an impeachable offense," Dean told PBS' Bill Moyers in 2004. "I think the case is overwhelming that these people presented false information to the Congress and to the American people." Bush's actions were actually far worse than Watergate, Dean contends, because "no one died for Nixon's so-called Watergate abuses."
  
  Lending credence to Dean's arguments, the Downing Street Memo revealed that Britain's MI-6 Director Richard Dearlove had told Tony Blair that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" by the Bush Administration. John Bonifaz, a Boston-based attorney and constitutional law expert, said that Bush seemingly "concealed important intelligence which he ought to have communicated," and "must certainly be punished for giving false information to the Senate." Bush deceived "the American people as to the basis for taking the nation into war against Iraq," Bonifaz argued--an impeachable offense.
  
  
• Rep. John Conyers argued as well that the president committed impeachable offenses" because he and senior administration officials "countenanced torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment in Iraq" at Abu Ghraib, and elsewhere, including Guantanamo Bay and the now-notorious "black sites" around the world.
  
  
• The most compelling evidence of Bush's high crimes and misdemeanors is the revelation that he repeatedly authorized NSA spying on US citizens without obtaining the required warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court. Constitutional experts, politicians and ex-intelligence experts agree that Bush "committed a federal crime by wiretapping Americans." Rep. John Lewis--"the first major House figure to suggest impeaching Bush," said the AP--argued that the president "deliberately, systematically violated the law" in authorizing the wiretapping. Lewis added: "He is not King, he is president."

Meanwhile, Professor Jonathan Turley of George Washington University School of Law--a specialist in surveillance law--told Knight Ridder that Bush's actions "violated federal law" and raised "serious constitutional questions of high crimes and misdemeanors." It is worth remembering that an abuse of power similar to Bush's NSA wiretapping decision was part of the impeachment charge brought against Richard Nixon in 1974. [This comparison was brought home in the ACLU's powerful full page ad in the NYT of December 22nd.]

There are many reasons why it is crucial that the Democrats regain control of Congress in '06, but consider this one: If they do, there may be articles of impeachment introduced and the estimable John Conyers, who has led the fight to defend our constitution, would become Chair of the House Judiciary Committee. Wouldn't that be a truly just response to the real high crimes and misdemeanors that this lawbreaking president has so clearly committed?

Katrina vanden Heuvel is Editor of The Nation.

© 2005 The Nation

CHOICE AMERICA NETWORK

US Senator Russ Feingold (C), D-WI, addresses reporters after renewal of the USA Patriot Act failed to clear the US Senate. At left is US Senator Ken Salazar, D-C); at right is US Senator Patrick Leahy, D-VT. (AFP/Getty Images/File/Joshua Roberts)

"If we stand up and say, as we are doing now, that we are absolutely committed to fighting terrorism, and that we are absolutely committed to the civil liberties of the American people, then that's a winning position," Mr. Feingold said in a recent interview. "For us to show weakness on civil liberties at this point would be another sign to people that the Democratic Party is not standing up for what it believes in."

Polls suggest that the public is supportive of the act but skeptical. President Bush's admission on Saturday that he had authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans may have deepened that skepticism. With Mr. Bush facing criticism, even from within his own party, for his handling of the war in Iraq and his policies on the detention and treatment of military prisoners, the Patriot Act could soon become a casualty of shifting public sentiment.

The act's 16 major provisions are set to expire at the end of the month, and in his radio address on Saturday, Mr. Bush warned that the Senate action "endangers the lives of our citizens." He added, "In the war on terror, we cannot afford to be without this law for a single moment."

Senators on both sides agree that the law is necessary, yet on Sunday, their efforts to renew it remained stalled. Democrats are pressing for a three-month extension to give lawmakers time to settle their differences, but the White House and the Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, have refused.

"None of us want it to expire," Mr. Feingold said Sunday, in an appearance on the CNN television program "Late Edition" with Senator Arlen Specter, the Judiciary Committee chairman and the bill's chief Senate sponsor. "It is only the president who is basically playing chicken with us."

The legislation bottled up in the Senate was the product of weeks of negotiations with the House, which passed it last week by a vote of 251 to 174. The bill would make permanent 14 of the 16 provisions. Should they lapse, proponents of the extension say, investigators would be hampered in their pursuit of terrorists.

With the House trying to adjourn for the year early Monday and the Senate by midweek, Mr. Frist said Sunday that he had not decided whether to call for a second vote. Mr. Specter, meanwhile, said Sunday that he had called his Democratic counterpart, Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, to suggest a change in the bill. But asked if he thought it was still possible to get the bill passed, Mr. Specter did not sound optimistic. "Well, barely," he said.

Republicans say Democratic candidates will suffer in the 2006 mid-term elections if the act lapses, just as they did in 2002 when Democrats rejected legislation to create a new Department of Homeland Security.

"Here we go again," said Dick Wadhams, a Republican strategist who is now chief of staff to Senator George Allen of Virginia.

One Republican, Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, went so far as to warn colleagues that they would be held responsible for another attack. "God help us if there's some kind of terrorist attack when we are not protected by the Patriot Act," he said, adding, "We will have to answer for that."

At the same time, strategists of both parties say the Homeland Security debate and the Patriot Act debate are difficult to compare. As Mr. Wadhams noted, the Homeland Security fight took place one month before the 2002 elections, while the 2006 elections are still a year off.

Democrats held up passage of the Homeland Security bill because of a dispute over labor rights for federal employees, but the new debate focuses on the question of how to balance keeping Americans safe with protecting their civil liberties.

Polls show that public support for the Patriot Act has waned over time and that the more Americans know about the act, the less they like it.

An ABC News poll in June found that half of Americans believed the government was doing enough to protect their privacy, down from three-quarters shortly after the act was passed. A Gallup poll, also conducted in June, found that 30 percent believed the Patriot Act went "too far" in restricting civil liberties, but among those very familiar with the bill, the figure was 45 percent.

And a University of Connecticut survey, published in August, found that roughly three-quarters of Americans worried that the Patriot Act would be abused to investigate matters unrelated to terrorism.

"The polls are pretty clear that voters want limits on the government's power," said Geoff Garin, a Democratic strategist. "This is really an argument not about fighting terrorism but about checks and balances and unbridled government authority."

Mr. Garin says the Patriot Act generates particular suspicion among white male voters, who resist government intrusion on matters ranging from gun ownership to property rights. That could explain why the biggest supporter of gun rights in the Senate, Senator Larry Craig, Republican of Idaho, is among those backing the filibuster.

Another Republican backer of the filibuster, Senator John E. Sununu of New Hampshire, said: "In my state, I think there's pretty strong support for protecting civil liberties during times of war and peace."

It also helps the Democrats that some of the chief supporters of the filibuster, including Mr. Leahy and Mr. Feingold, have broken with their party on other issues. Both those senators recently voted to confirm Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. And in 2001, Mr. Feingold was the only Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee to vote to confirm John Ashcroft as attorney general.

Mr. Feingold, widely believed to be considering a run for the White House in 2008, sounded confident last week. "I hope and believe," he said, "that the Democrats are done allowing Republicans and others to use phony fears as a way to attack us."

Four years ago, U.S. Senator Russ Feingold distinguished himself as the Senate's premier defender of the Constitution, when he cast the chamber's sole vote against enactment of the Patriot Act. As a time when every other senator – even liberal Democrats with long records of championing the Bill of Rights -- joined the post-September 11 rush to curtail basic liberties, Feingold stood alone in defense of the principle that it was possible to combat terrorism and protect the rights of Americans.

But Feingold no longer stands alone. On Friday, he led a bipartisan group of senators that successfully blocked the administration's concerted effort to renew the Patriot Act in a form that maintains its most abusive components. A move by Republican leaders of the Senate to prevent Feingold from mounting a filibuster fell seven votes short of the number needed. A remarkable 47 senators – including Democrats and Republicans – backed the Wisconsin Democrat's stance. That's far more than the 40 needed to prevent a filibuster, and it means that Feingold now heads a coalition that should be able to force significant changes in the Patriot Act before the December 31 deadline for its renewal.

The Senate coalition that the maverick senator has assembled is made up of members from across the political spectrum – from Massachusetts Democrat Ted Kennedy, the dean of Senate liberals, to Idaho Republican Larry Craig, one of the chamber's most right-wing members – who have joined Feingold in calling for reform of the Patriot Act.

This coalition did not just form overnight.

It is the result of four years of hard work by Feingold and others who recognized that the fight to fix the Patriot Act would have to be a long-term struggle.

Some members of Congress were swayed by Feingold's constant pressure on Patriot Act issues, and by the fact that the senator was easily reelected in 2004 after a campaign in which he highlighted his opposition to the measure and his concern for the Constitution.

Others were influenced by the diligent efforts of U.S. Representative Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, and his allies in organizations of librarians and independent booksellers, who campaigned for three years to alert Americans to the fact that the Patriot Act allowed federal agents to collect information on the reading habits of law-abiding citizens.

Others, still, were convinced by the success that the Bill of Rights Defense Committee had in getting seven states and close to 400 communities across the country to go on record expressing concern about the damage done by the Patriot Act to Constitutional protections against illegal searches and other abuses.

So popular did the movement to fix the legislation become that this week, with the December 31 deadline for reauthorizing the Patriot Act looming, the Bush administration and its Congressional allies were forced to use a backdoor maneuver to thwart reforms that had been unanimously agreed to by the Senate. A conference committee report that was supposed to reconcile the Senate and House versions of the reauthorization measure instead was turned into a vehicle to maintain the most controversial and unpopular components of the Act.

The White House and its Congressional allies thought they could secure reauthorization of the act in a form that allowed the Justice Department and other federal agencies to continue running roughshod over the Bill of Rights by bringing the measure up on the eve of the Holiday recess and then spinning up the usual hyperventilated talk about how it is necessary to crush the Constitution in order to keep the American people safe.

The maneuver worked in the House, where the report was approved Wednesday by a 251-174 vote. (The administration won that vote only because 44 Democrats, including Minority Whip Steny Hoyer, D-Maryland, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chair Rahm Emanuel and Ben Cardin, a candidate for Maryland's open Senate seat in 2006 – voted with the vast majority of House Republicans for a measure that the American Civil Liberties Union condemned as lacking "needed safeguards to protect the privacy and constitutional freedoms of innocent Americans.")

But, even as the House fell in line with the administration's scheme, Feingold refused to back down. He met the White House onslaught with a promise to do everything in his power to block reauthorization of the act in a form that does not sufficiently address concerns about federal agencies entering the homes of citizens of innocent Americans, reviewing library and medical records as part of "fishing expeditions" and secretly subpoenaing information without following standard legal procedures.

Going into Friday's fight, Feingold assembled an unlikely coalition of liberal Democrats and libertarian Republicans to press his case against reauthorization in the manner demanded by the administration. The coalition came together around the premise that freedom need not be sacrificed in order to maintain security.

While he had allies this time, it was still Feingold who took the lead – and who took the heat.

When Attorney General Alberto Gonzales lobbied the Senate on behalf of the conference report, claiming that the version under consideration was respectful of civil liberties and pleading with senators to "trust" the administration to do the right thing, Feingold took to the floor of the Senate with a blistering response.

"Trust of government cannot be demanded, or asserted, or assumed, it must be earned," the senator said. "And this government has not earned our trust. It has fought reasonable safeguards for constitutional freedoms every step of the way. It has resisted congressional oversight and often misled the public about its use of the Patriot Act. And now the Attorney General is arguing that the conference report is adequate ‘protection for civil liberties for all Americans.' It isn't."

In the end, every Democratic senator except South Dakota's Tim Johnson and Nebraska's Ben Nelson (who voted with the Republicans), and Connecticut's Chris Dodd (who did not vote) sided with Feingold. So, too, did Vermont Independent Jim Jeffords and three conservative Republicans: Idaho's Craig, Nebraska's Chuck Hagel and New Hampshire's John Sununu. (Republican Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, an ally of the administration, also voted against cloture in order to maintain his ability to reopen the issue.)

The failure of the Senate to block Feingold's filibuster threat does not doom the Patriot Act. The likelihood is that it will be renewed in some form. But the version that is eventually approved should be significantly more respectful of the Bill of Rights than the version the administration wanted.

That's all that Russ Feingold has been asking for since he began his lonely challenge to the Patriot Act back in 2001. The only difference is that, now, Feingold's voice is part of a bipartisan chorus that is demanding that Constitutional rights be defended by the members of Congress who have sworn to uphold that document.

As Feingold said Friday, "Today's vote proves that this is not a partisan issue. This is an American issue and a constitutional issue. Now is the time to come together to give the government the tools it needs to fight terrorism and protect the rights and freedoms of innocent citizens."

John Nichols, The Nation's Washington correspondent, has covered progressive politics and activism in the United States and abroad for more than a decade. He is currently the editor of the editorial page of Madison, Wisconsin's Capital Times. Nichols is the author of two books: It's the Media, Stupid and Jews for Buchanan.

© 2005 The Nation