[Peace-discuss] Romney/cat/bag

[C. G. Estabrook]

[There's not much policy difference amongst the "top-tier" candidates 
for president.  They all have to buy the general policy of the US ruling 
class on, say, killing people in the Middle East, transferring money 
from the poor to the rich through the healthcare system, etc.  (If they 
didn't, they'd have to sit at the kids' table with Kucinich and Paul.) 
  So their problem is the Coke/Pepsi problem: establish some product 
differentiation.  Since they can only say the same veiled things on 
serious policy, they have to talk about "character" or symbolic issues 
like evolution.  But sometimes the veil slips, and one of them is unwise 
enough to say something about the real policy that they all agree on 
(except K & P).  That seems to have happened to Romney, but the media 
have quickly covered it up.  --CGE]

	Mitt Romney's pursuit of tyrannical power, literally
	The candidate's answers to key questions of executive
	power are beyond disturbing.
	Glenn Greenwald
	Dec. 23, 2007 |

In yet another superb piece of journalism, the peerless Charlie Savage 
of The Boston Globe submitted to the leading presidential candidates a 
questionnaire asking their views on 12 key questions regarding executive 
power. Savage's article accompanying the candidates' responses makes 
clear why these matters are so critical:

     "In 2000, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were not asked about 
presidential power, and they volunteered nothing about their attitude 
toward the issue to voters. Yet once in office, they immediately began 
seeking out ways to concentrate more unchecked power in the White House 
-- not just for themselves, but also for their successors. . . .

     "Legal specialists say decisions by the next president -- either to 
keep using the expanded powers Bush and Cheney developed, or to abandon 
their legal and political precedents -- will help determine whether a 
stronger presidency becomes permanent.

     "'The sleeper issue in this campaign involves the proper scope of 
executive power,' said Richard Epstein, a University of Chicago law 
professor."

All of the leading Democrats -- Edwards, Dodd, Biden, Clinton, 
Richardson and Obama -- submitted responses, as did Mitt Romney, John 
McCain and Ron Paul. Refusing to respond to the questions were -- 
revealingly -- Giuliani, Thompson and Huckabee. Significantly, if not 
surprisingly, all of the candidates who did respond, with the exception 
of Romney, repudiated most of the key doctrines of the 
Bush/Cheney/Addington/Yoo theories of executive omnipotence, at least 
for purposes of this questionnaire. I'll undoubtedly write more about 
those responses shortly.

But by far the most extraordinary answers come from Mitt Romney. 
Romney's responses -- not to some of the questions but to every single 
one of them -- are beyond disturbing. The powers he claims the President 
possesses are definitively -- literally -- tyrannical, unrecognizable in 
the pre-2001 American system of government and, in some meaningful ways, 
even beyond what the Bush/Cheney cadre of authoritarian legal theorists 
have claimed.

After reviewing those responses, Marty Lederman concluded: "Romney? 
Let's put it this way: If you've liked Dick Cheney and David Addington, 
you're gonna love Mitt Romney." Anonymous Liberal similarly observed 
that his responses reveal that "Romney doesn't believe the president's 
power to be subject to any serious constraints." To say that the 
President's powers are not "subject to any serious constraints" -- which 
is exactly what Romney says -- is, of course, to posit the President as 
tyrant, not metaphorically or with hyperbole, but by definition.

Each of the questions posed by Savage is devoted to determining the 
extent of presidential power the candidate believes exists and where the 
limits are situated. On every issue, Romney either (a) explicitly says 
that the President has the right to act without limits of any kind or 
(b) provides blatantly nonresponsive answers strongly insinuating the 
same thing.

Just go and read what he wrote. It's extraordinary. Other than his 
cursory and quite creepy concession that U.S. citizens detained by the 
President are entitled to "at least some type of habeas corpus relief" 
-- whatever "some type" might mean (Question 5) -- Romney does not 
recognize a single limit on presidential power. Not one.

And even with regard to his grudging allowance that American citizens 
should have "some type of habeas relief," Romney -- and only he -- 
implicitly endorses Alberto Gonzales' bizarre claim that -- despite the 
clear language of Article I, Section 9 -- "nothing in the Constitution 
confers an affirmative right to habeas corpus" (Question 9). Under this 
twisted Romney/Gonzales view, the right of habeas corpus -- which Thomas 
Jefferson described as "one of the essential principles of our 
government" and "the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a 
government can be held to the principles of its constitution" -- is not 
constitutionally guaranteed to Americans but can be revoked at any time, 
for any reason.

In every area, Romney explicitly says that neither laws nor treaties can 
limit the President's conduct. Instead, displaying the fear-mongering 
cowardice that lies at the heart of Bush/Cheney Republican power, Romney 
described the root of his view of the world this way: "Our most basic 
civil liberty is the right to be kept alive."

Romney recited that cowardly platitude -- what has now become the 
shameful flagship of the Republican Party -- in response to being asked 
whether the President has the power to eavesdrop on Americans without 
warrants even in the face of a law that makes it a crime to do so. At 
its core, the defining principle of the Republican Party continues to be 
a fear-driven repudiation of the American ethos as most famously 
expressed by Patrick Henry, all in service of keeping the citizenry in 
fear so the President can rule without limits.

These are just some of the powers which Romney -- and, among the 
respondents, Romney alone -- claimed the President possesses, either by 
explicitly claiming them or refusing to repudiate them when asked directly:

     * to eavesdrop on Americans with no warrants, even if doing so is 
in violation of Congressional law (Question 1);

     * to attack Iran without Congressional authorization, even in the 
absence of an imminent threat (Question 2);

     * to disregard a congressional statute limiting the deployment of 
troops (Question 3);

     * to issue a signing statement reserving a constitutional right to 
bypass laws enacted by Congress (Question 4);

     * to disregard international human rights treaties that the US 
Senate has ratified where said treaties, in his view, "impinge upon the 
President's constitutional authority" (Question 8)

Even more disturbing were the specific questions Romney refused to 
answer. When asked if the President has the right to use "interrogation 
techniques" that Congress, by law, has prohibited in all circumstances, 
here is what Romney said (Question 7):

     "A President should decline to reveal the method and duration of 
interrogation techniques to be used against high value terrorists who 
are likely to have counter-interrogation training. This discretion 
should extend to declining to provide an opinion as to whether Congress 
may validly limit his power as to the use of a particular technique, 
especially given Congress's current plans to try to do exactly that."

Mitt Romney is running for President and proudly refuses to say if he 
would obey the law regarding torture. Worse, he's citing national 
security as an excuse for refusing to answer the question. He's not even 
President yet, and he's already insisting that it's too Top Secret for 
him even to participate in the debate over the President's duties to 
abide by the law. Even considering where our country has been taken with 
these matters, that's an astonishing assertion -- that the Terrorists 
will win if Mitt Romney expresses his views on whether the President 
must obey the law.

Underscoring his authoritarian mentality, Romney refused to say that 
there was even a single "executive power the Bush administration has 
claimed or exercised that [he] think[s] is unconstitutional" or even 
that there were any which were "simply a bad idea" (Question 10). In 
Romney's view, the Leader has not erred at all. Rather, this is the 
caricature of a response he gave to that question:

     "The Bush Administration has kept the American people safe since 
9/11. The Administration's strong view on executive power may well have 
contributed to that fact."

Romney perfectly expresses the driving view of our GOP-dominated 
political culture over the last seven years, as profoundly un-American 
as it is Orwellian: You are in grave danger of being slaughtered by 
Terrorists. The only thing that matters is that your Leader protect you. 
In order to be safe, you must place your blind faith and trust in the 
Leader. There can be no limits on the Leader's power -- not even ones 
you try to place on him through your representatives in Congress -- 
otherwise you will be in severe danger and might even lose your freedoms.

In a Washington Post Op-Ed this morning, historian and George Washington 
biographer Joseph Ellis labels Dick Cheney's quest for limitless 
presidential power "historically myopic" and writes:

     "Your opinion on the current debate about how much power the 
executive branch should have will be significantly influenced if you 
read the debates about the subject in the Constitutional Convention and 
the states' ratifying conventions. For it will soon become clear that 
the most palpable fear that haunted all these debates was the specter of 
monarchy."

Although one would not have thought it possible, a Mitt Romney 
presidency, by his own description, would remove us still further from 
those core principles. Romney isn't running to be President, but to be 
King. Anyone who wants to dispute that ought to try to distinguish the 
fantasies of power Romney is envisioning from those the British King 
possessed in the mid-to-late 18th Century.

-- Glenn Greenwald

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/12/23/romney/print.html