Gore Said What Needed To Be Said

by Dave Zweifel

Al Gore, the man who the majority of American voters chose to be president in 2000, created one big stir last week with his Martin Luther King Jr. Day speech in which he called on the people to take back the Constitution.

The buzz is still buzzing, including some calling for the former vice president to run for president again in 2008.

"We are looking for a leader! Someone to lead us out of the wilderness. And today Al Gore sounded the bell. A call to arms that hit a nerve. It's time to get them back. It's time to be unafraid. It's time to take on these right wing zealots and push back harder than they expect," opined Cenk Uygur on HuffingtonPost.com.

There's speculation that Gore is indeed determined to make a comeback, dismayed by the lack of any real front-runners at this point to lead the Democratic Party against the Republicans.

Whatever his motivation to compare the Bush administration's penchant to thumb its nose at the Constitution with J. Edgar Hoover's hounding of Martin Luther King Jr., he did us all a service.

As veteran political columnist David Broder wrote in the Washington Post, Gore's speech "was as comprehensive a rundown of George W. Bush's ventures to the limits of executive authority as anyone could hope to find."

The former vice president provided a litany of constitutional transgressions committed by this administration, from the Abu Ghraib prison scandal to its pathetic foot dragging on prohibiting the torture of prisoners held by Americans to its secret wiretapping of Americans' phone calls.

"It is imperative that respect for the rule of law be restored," Gore told a Washington audience that interrupted his talk with standing ovations several times.
"The president and I agree on one thing. The threat from terrorism is all too real. There is simply no question that we continue to face new challenges in the wake of the attack on Sept. 11 and that we must be ever-vigilant in protecting our citizens from harm," he remarked. "Where we disagree is that we have to break the law or sacrifice our system of government to protect Americans from terrorism. In fact, doing so makes us weaker and more vulnerable.

"Once violated, the rule of law is in danger. Unless stopped, lawlessness grows. The greater the power of the executive grows, the more difficult it becomes for the other branches to perform their constitutional roles," he added. "Once that ability is lost, democracy itself is threatened and we become a government of men and not laws."

Gore didn't mention this, but an example of the Bush attitude that his administration is above the law is his so-called "signing statement" when he ratified the John McCain-inspired law to prohibit the torture of military detainees a law that the president fought tooth and nail to kill in Congress.

"The executive branch shall construe (the torture ban law) in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the president to supervise the unitary executive branch and as commander in chief and consistent with the constitutional limitations on the judicial power, which will assist in achieving the shared objective of the Congress and the president, evidenced in Title X, of protecting the American people from further terrorist attacks."

In other words, Bush was saying that he'll follow the law, but if national security gets in the way (as defined by him, I guess), he won't.

Give Al Gore, candidate or not, credit for standing up to this flagrant and unlawful behavior. It's time that others did, too.