Bulletin 3:
Ten Threats to the Republic
By Gene R. Nichol
Like many, I’ve come to think of next fall’s presidential election as the most important in my lifetime. Here are ten reasons why.
1) The practice of cash register politics – long a threat to effective democracy in this country – has achieved ascendancy. In the halls of the legislative and executive branches of the federal government, moneychangers control. As purchased politics becomes more brazen, and more commonplace, opposition weakens. Much of our democracy is for sale. Over 99 percent of us can’t afford the asking price.
2) Unsurprisingly, we govern for privilege. The richest nation in human history allows almost a fifth of its children to live in wrenching poverty – far worse than many other industrial nations. As if any theory of justice or virtue could explain the exclusion of innocent kids from the American dream. The president and the leaders of Congress are apparently untroubled by our scourge of child poverty.
3) Nor is the neglect merely benign. Faced with debilitating inequality, our current leaders consistently, willfully and unfaithfully move to make it worse. Cutting estate taxes, cutting capital gains taxes, cutting income taxes for the wealthy, subsidizing business – while slashing essential services for the poor. The president appears to believe our main problem is that those at the bottom have too much and those at the top don’t have enough.
4) As our schools become more segregated, and as racial minorities continue to be excluded from the full promise of American life, the executive branch wages war against affirmative action, reduces anti-discrimination efforts and nominates judges uncongenial to civil rights. The promises of Brown vs. Board of Education have been quietly removed from our national agenda.
5) The president effectively asserts that a woman’s right to control her own body extends only so far as someone else’s religious belief. He embraces a fundamentalism that focuses primarily on curing other people’s habits. He endorses policies that suggest interest in children begins at conception and ends at birth. And unlike many of his predecessors, this president acts upon his predispositions – regardless of the facts. With another term, given the narrow margins on the Supreme Court, he’ll likely get his way. The liberty of American women will be markedly diminished in the process.
6) The executive branch has moved to “go it alone” – not only in foreign affairs, but in domestic policy as well. We may have three branches of government, but only one matters. Secret detentions, gag orders, warrantless searches, restrictions on judicial power, denials of congressional oversight, assertions of privilege – the list is long. The principal author of 0ur Constitution warned, “the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive and judicial, in the same hands, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” The Bush administration would have frightened James Madison.
7) The Department of Justice, amazingly, has proclaimed that an American citizen can be seized off the streets of the heartland, thrown into a Navy brig, without charges, without counsel, without trial—forever—on the signature of a single politician. The attorney general of the United States is a frank threat to the traditions of the rule of law.
8) A strain of anti-constitutionalism has infected the federal government. It began with claims that various immigrant groups would, necessarily, be in for constitutionally tough treatment. Then those who raised objections based on civil rights were tagged as aiding terrorists. Next, we learned that constitutional constraint might have been fine for earlier, less traumatic times. But now the dangers are too great. Finally, the lessons apparently became internalized – at home, at Guantanamo, at Abu Ghraib.
9) There is no greater betrayal of American honor, sacrifice, commitment, principle, and patriotism than the invasion of a foreign nation – including the killing of innocent children – that posed no imminent threat to the international community or to us. That grave sin was enlarged by trading upon the idealism of young women and men in suggesting that they fight in Iraq to avenge the horrors of Sept. 11 – when we knew it wasn’t so. Such deceptive belligerence is moral disgrace.
10) The times call for acts of high citizenship. For those who believe the American republic is meant to be a powerful force of hope and progress, engagement is demanded. These are not simply questions of right and left, they’re questions of right and wrong. Occasionally elections vie for the soul of a nation. 2004 is one of those years.
Dean Nichol is Dean and Burton Craige Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. This statement was published in the Raleigh News and Observer on July 28, 2004 and is used with permission or both author and publisher.
