Broken Nation [View All]

[Time for change]

John Dean, formal legal counsel to President Richard Nixon, holds the proud distinction of being THE key witness in the investigation that forced the only presidential resignation in U.S. history. It was his whistle blowing testimony in June 1973 before the Senate Watergate Committee that provided the direct evidence of Richard Nixon’s knowledge of the Watergate break-in and made possible the impeachment hearings that led to Nixon’s resignation. If not for his testimony it is highly doubtful that Nixon would have been forced from office.

The Nixon impeachment effort could have and should have – but did not – set a crucially important precedent for our nation. A President who greatly abused the U.S. Constitution and the laws of our nation was brought to account for his crimes. Less than three months after Nixon’s resignation the Democratic Party that led the impeachment efforts picked up 48 seats in the House of Representatives and 5 seats in the Senate. Two years later they won back the Presidency against the man who pardoned Nixon for his crimes.

The Senate Watergate Committee hearings were one of the most exciting political events I’ve ever witnessed, and John Dean was one of the most impressive witnesses I’ve ever seen. Day after day he provided the critical testimony that brought down a president, and he never flinched under intense cross-examination by Nixon’s attorneys. I was convinced that he was telling the truth, despite all the efforts to smear his name, and he was completely vindicated when it was discovered that the conversations with the president that he had testified to had been taped, and those tapes bore out his story word for word.

Thirty-five years later Dean describes himself as someone with “four decades of experience in national politics, much of it as a card-carrying Republican”. But as he watched the Republican Party destroying our government Dean became concerned to the point that he recently wrote a book titled “Broken Government – How Republican Rule Destroyed the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial Branches”. His disenchantment with his former party can be summed up with the following paragraph:

Having watched the GOP’s evolution as it embraced the radicalism of authoritarian conservatism, slowly ceding control to its most strident faction, the authoritarian conservatives, I can no longer recognize the party. These new conservative leaders have not only sought to turn back the clock, but to return to a time before the Enlightenment when there were no clocks… Indeed, they have rejected their own reasoned philosophy by ignoring conservatism’s teachings… about the dangers of concentration of power…

“Broken Government” is a hard hitting book that provides a great amount of detail as to how the Republican Party is destroying our government and our country. We should all hope that between now and Election Day 2008 this book is widely read and the information it describes widely disseminated. In this post I’ll summarize some of what Dean has to say about how the Republican Party is destroying our three branches of government:


Legislative abuse

Dean tells of the Republican cabal in Congress that sought to freeze Democrats completely out of the legislative process so that Republican legislators could govern alone and better serve the interests of their corporate donors. They did this largely by routinely ignoring House rules that were inconvenient for them, allowing a bare majority of Republicans in the House to control the legislative process. Rolling Stone editor Matt Taibi explains in “The Worst Congress Ever”:

When Gingrich and colleagues took charge, they made it “a one-party town – and congressional business was conducted accordingly, as though the half of the country that the Democrats represent simply did not exist.

Perhaps worst of all is that our Republican Congress became simply an enabler of presidential abuse of power, completely disavowing its oversight responsibilities:

The Republican-controlled Congress has created a new standard for the use of oversight powers. That standard seems to be that when a Democratic president is in power, there are no matters too stupid or meaningless to be investigated fully – but when George Bush is president, no evidence of corruption or incompetence is shocking enough to warrant Congressional attention. One gets the sense that Bush would have to drink the blood of Christian babies to inspire hearings in the Republican Congress – and only then if he did it during a nationally televised State of the Union address…

While Republicans claim to be the party of “moral values”, their ideological mission of shrinking government so that they can cut taxes on the rich and deregulate powerful corporations at the expense of the American people, belies that claim. Their ideological mission therefore requires them to cut support for housing, education, health care, and community development and raise taxes on the poor so that they can afford the things that they really care about – like war and obscenely high profits for their corporate cronies. The explosion of top level Republican scandals in 2006, resulting in the convictions of men such as Jack Abramoff, Bob Ney, Tom DeLay, and Duke Cunningham, drive home the point that so many Republicans participate in government largely for the purpose of lining their own pockets. Dean sums up the role of our Republican Congresses over the past couple of decades:

Conservative antigovernment philosophy works best when conservatives are in the minority, for they then have no responsibility to accomplish anything. In that position they are very good at obstructionism and using their minority status to make the Democrats look bad. This is, in fact, how they won control of Congress in 1994… Republicans achieved that victory by doing their best over the course of a number of years to destroy the place and then put the blame for it on the Democrats… Democrats… who fail to bring this to the attention of voters are not only missing an opportunity but are allowing Republicans to engage in conduct that should never be considered acceptable.

Abuse of Presidential power and the need for impeachment

The abuses of presidential power and other impeachable offenses committed by George Bush and Dick Cheney are so numerous that they couldn’t possibly be dealt with thoroughly in a single book. I’ve described some of these offenses in many posts, including one titled “How Much Evidence Does Congress Need Before they Begin to Remove the Cancer on our Nation?”. In this post I’ll just relate what John Dean has to say on this issue. He especially dwells on George Bush’s abuse of “signing statements”, which he uses as an excuse to avoid complying with laws enacted by Congress, as that represents such an obvious and egregious abuse of the Constitutional function of the President, whose job it is to enforce the laws of our nation:

If, in fact, Bush has refused to enforce the 1,140 provisions in about 150 federal bills he should be impeached immediately – notwithstanding Speaker Pelosi’s lack of interest – because it would be an extraordinary breach of his oath. Given Bush’s characteristically truculent attitude, it is difficult to believe that he is issuing these signing statements as a symbolic gesture. By refusing to employ his veto power, yet telling Congress that he will not enforce laws he is gaming the system in a fashion never intended by the framers of our Constitution. His actions are an insult to the lawmaking process, for which he claims he does not have to follow the Constitutional rules…

From the beginning or our nation’s history… separation of powers has been the uniquely distinguishing feature of our democratic republic. Presidential war powers that need no Congressional approval, a presidency that acts on radical legal advice and embraces a concocted theory of presidential powers far greater than Americans rejected first with King George III, and more recently with Richard Nixon’s imperial presidency, are no small threat to our government and its underlying principles.

In the last few pages of his book, Dean sums up the problem, explaining how our government currently works very differently than it used to:

Evidence that the system has changed is also apparent when a president can deliberately and openly violate the law – as, for example, simply brushing aside statutory provision against torture and electronic surveillance – without any serious consequences… Alberto Gonzalez faced no consequences when he politicized the Justice Department as never before, allowing his aides to violate the prohibition against hiring career civil servants based on their party affiliation, and then give false public statements and testimony on the matter… The fact that Bush’s Justice Department has become yet another political instrument should give Americans pause. This body was created by Congress to represent the interests of the people of the United States, not the Republican Party, but since the system no longer takes account of when officials act outside the law (not to mention the Constitution), Republicans do so and get away with it.

Turning our federal judiciary into an extension of Republican presidents

Dean explains how, since Richard Nixon, consecutive Republican presidents with the exception of Gerald Ford have engaged in a concerted attempt to remake the federal judiciary into a radical right wing extension and enabler of Republican presidents. That attempt has been largely successful, and they are now one U.S. Supreme Court vote short of radically changing Constitutional law in our country. In Dean’s words:

Corrupting the independence and impartiality of the federal judiciary has been a priority of Republican presidents, who have devoted four decades to selecting primarily judges and justices with a radical conservative political philosophy. As a result these Republican-appointed jurists, who now constitute the prevailing majority, are no more objective and open-minded on countless issues that regularly come before the federal courts than the Republican National Committee.

In a recent post, I discuss the changes that John Dean and others believe will occur if one more radical right wing justice is appointed to the USSC. These include:

 The overturning of Roe v. Wade
 The total extinction of affirmative action
 The enabling of our states to overturn (page 68) our entire Bill of Rights without federal interference
 Radical curtailing of civil rights for women, homosexuals, and minority racial groups
 The declaring of environmental protection laws to be unconstitutional
 The widespread disappearance of habeas corpus
 The virtual creation of Christianity as a national religion
 The Dismantling of the Voting Rights Act of 1965

Dean describes the precarious state that we are in with regard to our federal judiciary:

Republicans are not satisfied with a conservative federal judiciary; they want a fundamentalist one, and they are frighteningly close to achieving that goal…

Today the GOP demand for ideological purity for federal judges weakens the third branch as a constitutional co-equal, and weakens its institutional judgment…. Nothing should be more troubling to Americans who vote in the next several presidential elections than the looming prospect of a solid block of judicial fundamentalists controlling the federal judiciary. Obviously, there is only one way to prevent this: Not to vote for another GOP president until the federal judiciary is back in balance… The Republican candidates are already parroting the familiar mantra that, if they are elected president, they will select judges and justices who “don’t legislate from the bench”. This, of course, is nonsense. With the exception of Ron Paul… every single Republican candidate can be counted on by the conservative base to continue doing exactly what Nixon, Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II have done, and that is to put as many judicial fundamentalists on the federal bench as they can push through the Senate.

Broken nation

One respect in which I differ somewhat from Dean’s opinions is that he seems very optimistic that a succession of Democratic presidents and Congresses will repair the damage. To that end he discusses in detail how much Congress has improved already under Democratic leadership. I’m not so sure. In spite of all the improvements in the functioning of Congress since January 2007 that Dean mentions, its failure to halt the Iraq War and to hold the Bush administration accountable for its numerous crimes by impeaching Bush and Cheney is terribly worrisome to me. An imperialist nation with leaders who are not required to operate under the rule of law is not my idea of a functioning democracy. Future Democratic Presidents and Congresses will need a lot of courage if they are to repair the damage. They will also need to resist the temptation of bowing to corporate interests at the expense of the American people. Corporations have become so powerful in our country today that they pose a serious obstacle to meaningful reform. Reversing that situation will be very difficult indeed.

As our government has become broken, so has our nation. The “broken government” that John Dean speaks of has had tragic consequences, one of the most important being the expanding wealth gap in our country. That gap is not only tragic in and of itself, but it also provides substantial political power to a small elite group of super wealthy people, who use that political power to further increase their wealth and expand their power. James Petras, in his book “Rulers and Ruled in the US Empire”, discusses what has become of the US economy:

The inequalities in pay between the US capitalist ruling class and workers increased fourfold between 1990 and 2004…. By 2004… the ratio was approximately 430 times. It is abundantly clear that the key problem of capitalism is the increasing inequalities resulting from heightened exploitation (of workers and consumers)…

Luxury goods industries are booming as profits of the ruling classes… are expanding… In contrast, the numbers of workers covered by company-financed health plans and pensions declined… Rising inequality is providing the great motor force for capitalist accumulation – a clear consequence of rising profits based on greater exploitation.

John Dean ends his book with an anonymous quote from a friend of his from the Nixon administration – anonymous because he is worried about retribution against his family:

Just tell your readers that you have a source who knows a lot about the Republican Party from long experience… and he has a bit of advice: People should not vote for any Republican because they’re dangerous, dishonest, and self-serving… The government is truly broken … and another four years under the Republicans, and our grandchildren will have to build a new government because the one we have will be unrecognizable and unworkable.