You were doing fine! Why did you ugly up your post with a cheap, unrelated ad hominem?
If you think Ashcroft is very much cast in the mold of the administrators of the Third Reich (and I for one do) then it’s not unrelated, cheap or ad hominem, it’s more supporting evidence.
I’m a hardened liberal. Yet this nonsense about likening the current Administration to the NSDAP regime is frankly riduculous! I don’t agree with Bush & Co. and I think they’re doing some international damage with their tour-de-force mentality.
But if you start compairing them to Hitler and his cronies, you are demonstrating an absolute lack of historical knowledge. Using miltary force as a geo-political tool was not invented by Hitler (try the early Sumerian city states). Nor is the type of military operations conducted by Wolfowitz and Fellas aimed at achieving what Himmler envisioned: a Teutonic cast system.
Ashcroft is not good news. But if you compaire him to Heydrich and Goering, he’s a sweet little lamb on a collar. Although his philosophy of merging executive power with judicial due process may come somewhat close to the legal philosophy of the NSDAP, it by no means is unique to the NSDAP. Yes, I would consider it a hallmark of fascism. But Ashcroft’s demeanour still shows an inkling of respect for justice. During the NSDAP regime such respect was uttely eclipsed by the personal greed of the factions competing for judicial power.
Please, before you start pooring out these lascivious comments about the Bush/Hitler paradigm, pick up at least the 101 of European Political History in the 20th Century…
You are barking up the wrong tree.
Here is a cite from one of my earlier posts: “It is my opinion that the USA Patriot Act is just the sort of emergency executive power that the legislature in Germany gave to the executive at that time. I believe that a person like Hitler [bolding added] could take the USA Patriot Actand do exactly the same things here to the scapegoat group that was done to the so-called “undesirables” in Germany.”
Fears that the USA Patriot act gives too much power to the exective without proper checks and balances on that power seem to be shared by members of the US House of Representatives whose members are highly unlikely to compare GW, et. al. to Nazis.
There is obviously no comparison between current administration leaders and the Nazi leadership in Germany. The point is that the processes by which power was transferred to the executive were similar in the two cases. A national crisis, either real or perceived, was used in what looks to me like a panic reaction as the justification to grant the executive emergency powers which are hazardous to civil liberties and easily subject to misuse.
Once such powers are granted, they can be and are used as justifying precedent for ratcheting up that power to a higher level when the next crisis comes. Limitations on executive one-man governance is like virginity; once lost it can’t be regained.
One poster stated that the German Enabling Act gave the executive legislative power and the USA Patriot Act doesn’t. But that is a mere quibble over means. The end result in both cases is the the executive is empowered to act unilateraly, without much of a check on those actions that I can see, in such cases as he, or she, alone decides warrants such action.
I agree. This is the essence of the fascist philosophy, from which national socialism (which is not quite equatable with fascism) borrowed its ideas about justice. The judicial branch must not hinder the executive branch from fulfilling its mission of upholding law and order. Criminals must not get away based on technical violations of due process.
The idea in Germany was that judges had to give KRIPO and GESTAPO sufficient leeway to safeguard society against its enemies (meaning anything from petty thieves to political opponents of the state). In end effect, this made the judicial branch a useless signatory puppet of executive power, something some NSDAP members were opposed to. For example, Guernter and Dr. Hans Frank, in an attempt to curb the powers of the police, set up a commission in 1933 to develop a penal code based on popular values.
But…
A big difference between the Enabling Act and the Patriot Act is found in Article 2 of the Ermaechtigungsgesetz (Enabling Act):
Which says, roughly translated, that laws enacted by the executive branch (Reichregierung) can, unless the legislative branches (Reichstags and Reichsrats) object, deviate from the Constitution. Provisions of the Patriot Act can still be declared unconstitutional!
Oh sure, Germany didn’t have an over 200 year history of civil rights and so slid into one-man rule a lot easier than would be the case here.
As to the USA Patriot Act being declared unconstitutional, the courts so far have shown considerable deference to the executive (I don’t have court case cites at my fingertips), apparently because of the perceived emergency.
I heard Justice Breyer in responding to a question about the search and seizure provisions of the Act, that the House of Representatives is now worried about, say that the constitution only forbids “unreasonable” search and seizure. It is entirely possible for the Supreme Court to rule that after Congress has considered and debated the emergency powers needed under what they see as the present situation’s needs that the search and seizure provisions of the Act are not at all unreasonable. After all, Congress has the power to provide for the common defense and the power to pass “all laws necessary and proper” in order to do it. In effect, the Congress can delegate its legislative function to the executive in the form of executive orders.
And, of course, the Act isn’t all that easy to declare unconstitutional. The Congress made each and every provision of it severable so if one provision is struck out the others are not affected. The Act amends about 18 different other laws in addition to its own original provisions and nobody knows for sure what it means, so the executive is free to push as hard as it likes until stopped.
My point is that if the power is there someone will use it sooner or later. All that is needed is a power hungry executive and an emergency and that will happen sometime as long as the act is in force. Murphy’s Law that anything that can happen will, is entirely true if you wait long enough.
SUPERKARLENE already did.
True. Germany of 1871-1918 was certainly authoritarian. Liberal in some practical senses but when liberal, only liberal “from above”. Part of the reason that the Nazis could force through the Ermaechtigungsgesetz (Enabling Act) was that from 1918 and onwards, a conservative revolution had been promoted both intellectually and emotionally. Moeller van den Brucks book Das Dritte Recih (The Third Recih) written in 1923 symbolizes that movement to restore the authoritarian stability of Wilhelmine Germany.
So it wasn’t too hard for the NSDAP to convince the ultra conservatives to allow the Enabling Act to pass. And then enact it in its full glory, leading in conjunction with the Gleichschaltung (Equalization) to a practical disolution of the Weimar Republic. But it wasn’t just enough to have one power hungry executive!
A big portion of the Germany nation was behind getting rid of Weihmar. They certainly didn’t dream of the Himmlerian “Blut und Erde” nightmare concocted by a crackpot who thought Germany should return to its agrarian Teutonic roots. Or the insiduous political control system dreamt up by Heydrich. Or the brutality of Goering. But they wanted stability. And in their minds that was equatable with authocracy.
I think you will be hard pressed to find a large support for nullifying the US Constitution per se. Conservatives may want to reestablish greater autonomy for the individual States, but they are entrapped by their desire to retain a strong and global geopolitical machinery.
The arguments of most American conservatives are rooted in literalist interpretations of the Constitution. So both factions, liberal and conservative, are working to uphold, not undo, the Constitution (as was the case in Germany). I am not endorsing the Patriot Act (which I have only partially worked my way through). I just don’t think it has the authority to undo the US. And the reason being given by yourself Simmons: strong traditions.
And that tradition is codified (eminates from) the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution. Vigilance is great. But crying wolf does us no good…
How? Declare several million people to be “unlawful combatants”? Do you really think that would fly?
That’s clearly false, as your own cite shows.
You’re the one quibbling; what does it matter what we call the powers? The point is that the Enabling Act gave sweeping powers that the Patriot Act does not. The Patriot Act doesn’t give the president the right to write new law.
The president needs congressional approval to declare war. Even when, as has been the case, the presidents avoids declaring war, he still needs Congress to allocate funds. And if Congress doesn’t like what he’s doing, they can impeach him.
But there’s a huge difference between judicial interference being unlikely, and being impossible. The Enabling Act amendment the Constitution, so declaring it unconstitutional would have been nonsensical. The Patriot Act is just a law, and does not supersede the Constitution.
That’s true but it’s not a bad first step. And once people get used to it, the next step is easier.
Judicial review, in some cases can be a farce. The case of the Japanese-American internment is illustrative. A case for the purpose of having it nullified by the judiciary reached the Supreme Court. (I’ll look it up if necessary.) In any case, the Court never went to the gist of the question at all. It merely ruled that the West Coast exclusion order by the Army’s western command was valid because it was in accord with the executive order. Whether the executive order and the exclusion was needed for national security was never examined. The President said it was and that was good enough for the Court.
It seems to me that tradition isn’t as strong as you think if your read the posts of many on this very board.
However, I think that since I’m 80 that inertia will allow civil rights to last as long as I need them. After that the rest of you can deal with it.
Theoretically true but the bar has been lowered considerably.
The US began military action in the Korean War using the Truman Doctrine and under UN approval. Congress never did declare war that I know of and everyone was meticulous about calling it a “Police Action.” It was a police action that involved armies, tanks, heavy artillery, B-52 Bombers and other such police paraphernalia.
The Vietnam War was waged under the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution passed as a result of what seems to have been the inflation by an administration bent on war of an incident in the Gulf.
And our present war is being fought under a blank check in the form of a Congressional resolution authorising the President to take action. It now looks like those of us who questioned the adequacy of the administrations evidence for an imminent danger to the US might have been right.
And as far as the Congress holding the purse strings, that is ineffective in cases of this sort. Would you believe for a moment that if Congress decides that the Iraq thing is all wrong that they would correct it by cutting off funds to our armed forces that are there?
And ditto impeachment. That is too long a process and too blunt and instrument to be used for this purpose.
But hang in there. I do sort of admire your rosy view of the motives of the current administration.
Well, I’m 32 and I have a son. So I hope that the Constitution will last for a good while longer and eventually be superceded by something even more just, inclusive and global in scope.
There’s no question that the Patriot Act is a step in the wrong direction, diluting amongst other things the concept of “enemy of the state”. But I beliebeve there’s a an important distinction between its intentions and the intentions of the Enabling Act.
The Patriot Act was not directly drawn up to undo the US. It was drawn up to protect it. Of course, what is meant by the “United States” is open to interpretation. Even the phrase “patriot” (as a commentary in the NY Times recently pointed out) has been used to mean someone who defends pluralism and civil rights as well as someone who protects a somewhat amorphous “American way of life” (white protestant, black baptist, chili dog eating, corn loving, baseball playing, Coca Cola addicted, gung-ho, machoist folk?).
The Enabling Act was clearly intended to undo the Weihmar Republic, something its authors had openly disclosed as being their main goal for years. The Enabling Act was drawn up to defend Germany against itself, whereas the Patriot Act was drawn up to defend the US against hostile foreign entities. So the NSDAP could justify doing just about anything since the corruption of the State was from within. The Weihmar Republic itself was seen as the most corrosive element of all, an internal threat opening the gates wide for the Bolsheviks revolution.
The Patriot Act, on the other hand, even contains clauses about the need to dissassociate the Islamic faith from the external threat. No one has come out with the idea that “the Founding Fathers sowed the seeds of our Nations demise”. No one has talked about rewriting the Constitution! The Patriot Act is ment to defend it. So if it contains clauses contradictory to it, the Act clearly does not fullfill its known intent. And hence, in due time, such clauses will be struck down.
I once had an argument on this board about whether the UDHR (Universal Declaration of Human Rights) constituted international law. Clearly it is not the practical execution of law. It’s something even higher: it is the moral foundation on which the UN must base its treaties and resolutions. The same goes for the Declaration of Independence. Until someone begins to denounce the spirit of that Declaration, the Patriot Act will be but an annoying temporary fluke during a time of hightened hysteria.
The Enabling Act was drawn up after the NSDAP had:
- Denounced the Republic
- Tried to overthrow it violantly
- Gone to prison for it
- Pledged to overthrow it by legal means
Clearly, the circumstances of drawing up the Patriot Act are vastly different, no? Intent matters because it is what words are measured by after they have been committed to paper.
It seems to me that you’re arguing against your own position. In times of crisis, this country has allowed extreme measures which we later regretted. Blaming this on the Patriot Act, when it clearly precedes it, makes no sense. If you’re really worried that the Supreme Court will ignore any excesses of the Bush Administration, then the passage of the Patriot Act is irrelevant. Bush could have simply presented the Patriot Act as an executive order. The fact that he didn’t shows that there is still respect for democratic processes.
The examples that you cite regarding presidential prosecution of war again serve my position than yours. In all of them the president sought and gained congressional approval, and in the long term military operations would have unsubstainable without such approval. And no, cutting the purse strings would not be lightly done. But a credible of such would almost certainly cause the president to back down, and if the situation were dire enough Congress would carry through on the threat. After all, Congress cut off funds for much less of a reason back in 95. And they impeached a president for much less, too.
And I don’t know what I’ve said that you consider a “rosy view of the motives of the current administration.” Does “Bush is nothing like Hitler” constitute a rosy view in your world?
This report in the Los Angeles Times bears on the efficacy of the courts vis-a-vis the Patriot Act.
How is judicial review possible if courts lose jurisdiction as soon as someone is declared an enemy combatant? Although different in method from the Enabling Act, the end result is that the courts are shoved aside by the executive.
The defendant, "… initially was charged with relatively minor crimes of fraud and giving false statements to the FBI. Insisting that he was innocent, Al-Marri refused to cooperate with authorities in return for a reduced sentence and was preparing for trial before Mihm [the federal judge in this case].
But on June 23, just weeks before the trial was to begin, prosecutors announced that they were dismissing the charges because Bush had designated Al-Marri an enemy combatant. He was flown out of Illinois and taken to the Naval Consolidated Brig in Charleston, S.C."
But, of course, our prosecutors are honorable men and would never use gamesmanship in these cases.
Not what I have claimed. I find the whole idea about “unlawful enemy combatants” quite troubling. But, do you really think that it is fare to draw parallels between this and the NSDAPs tactics of provoked violence, public intimidation and open racial bigotry?
This would not be the first Administration to commit some pretty heinous acts.
But, if Bush cam out and said:
or
how would the American people react?
Note, both quotes are taken from speeches made before the Reichstag was burnt down and the Enabling Act was passed.
This thread was started by someone who asked what went wrong in Nazi Germany. Several of us argued that Germany was just a confluence of factors that could happen anywhere at any time and were used by Hitler to carry out his schemes. No one has claimed that GW, or any other administration official was like that, only that in the what I think was a panicky hulabaloo after the WTC disaster, laws were passed that would allow someone to come along and proceed down a similar path here.
Not today, not tomorrow and mayber never because that twisted individual may never come along, but the precedent has been established that civil rights can be taken away at the behest of the president and that is dangerous.
And I don’t think this is alarmist. Jeb Magruder’s documentary on the Nixon-Watergate affair was the subject of a report on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer on 28 July. In addition to Magruder, one of Nixon’s staff, the Counsel to the Senate Watergate Investigating Committee, Sam Dash, also appeared.
Now knee-jerk conserviatives will pooh-pooh Dash because he resigned his position as Ethics watchdog in Ken Starr’s office on the ground that Starr had committed an ethical breach.
Anyway here is what Dash said on the program in response to questions by Gwen Ifill:
"SAM DASH: I think we’ve learned some very serious lessons and it was much more grave than Mr. Magruder is even indicating. When you say they would have done anything, we asked Mitchell, the attorney general, who said, ‘I would have done anything to get Nixon reelected’ and when asked does that include murder and he puffed his pipe and said. ‘That’s a tough question.’ You know, this was a very serious tragic time in America, we almost lost a democracy and our constitutional government.
And the good thing was that our government worked as the Constitution wanted it to work. It was a strong Senate, a strong Congress that was carrying out its constitutional oversight function, that exposed the criminal activities of the president, but not only exposed them but informed the public who were the ultimate sovereigns. So here a president resigned on the exposure of this based on the separation of powers, without bloodshed, it wasn’t a revolution, and a new president comes in without bloodshed. The government worked at this time.
GWEN IFILL: Because it worked does that mean that that would not, the lessons we learned from Watergate, does that mean those same mistakes would not be repeated again?
SAM DASH: No, no. It’s very important that this documentary be shown to the American people to remind them how close we came because although it worked then it doesn’t mean it would work now. And presidential abuse, even during this period when we so fear a terrorist attack that our present administration is seeking power that the constitution doesn’t really allow them to have, and an alert Congress, if they were alert and they’re not, would be holding this president accountable."
In addition, as I said and it is ignored, the House of Representatives passed a resolution indicating that the members on both sides of the aisle are starting have serious doubts about what they did.
I keep citing instances of the dangers of the lack of proper checks and balances in the government and you guys keep accusing me with the straw man of comparing GW, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, et al to Hitler, Himmler, Goebels and so forth.
I’m beginning to think that you are decifering my posts by means of an English to Lower Slobbovian phrase book.
Wonderful post there David Simmons. I’m writing from Australia by the way. Each afternoon the Jim Lehrer Newshour comes on at 5pm on one of our PBS style channels and I never miss it if I can.
It’s inarguably American public current affairs television at it’s very highest calibre. I saw the episode you’re referrring to by the way, and I was captivated.
Thank you but are you sure you can entirely trust someone who spells “deciphering” as “decifering?”
I agree with David Simmons 100%.
The vast majority of people anywhere, when troubled, look for simple answers to their problems. They look for strong authority figures who can lead them. They look for surrogate parents in their government leaders, their clergy, their teachers. It is an integral part of coping.
Almost all of history’s nightmares stem from this simple fact of human disposition. Yeah it is reductionist, but I think it is accurate. At a large scale, simple messages are not the best answers for complex situations. They may be the easiest to swallow, but they are often the most damaging.
Even though the Patriot Act, Rumsfeld, the insidious neocon movement, and corporate subservience in our government is in no way comparable with the maniacs and sadists who formed the NSDAP, there are still things we can learn from history. We learn that many will gladly do despicable things and sacrifice everything they hold dear if their strong leaders tell them it is necessary. We learn that the first steps to this are the quashing of opposition and the consolidation of power in the removal of checks and balances. We learn that a scared, servile public is a very malleable thing. So while we aren’t necessarily going down the road to facism, in some ways our situation mirrors the crises of 1920s and 1930s Germany. So now we need to be ultra-vigilant.
Some of my family are Fox News addicts. They are also observant Jews. The subject of France came up during a Friday night family Sabbath meal. These relatives (some cousins, my grandfather, and a great aunt) were talking ill about the French and French products. About how they betrayed us, etc. etc. I snuck in my usual liberal rhetoric: The French had their view, they stuck to their guns, and they were probably right. Of course debate ensued. My great aunt, who lost all of her uncles, aunts, and cousins to the Holocaust, said something which made my jaw drop. Something to the effect of “Who cares about the French, they aren’t human.”
What is more depressing to me than that statement, made by an old lady who is slightly nuts anyway, is that I didn’t have the guts to call her on it. Nor did anyone else in my family. I am still kicking myself over it. I should have called her out, I should have berated her. I should have embarrased her. Hell, I should have made her cry. And I sat there, and the moment passed, and I didn’t say anything.
If you fancy yourself an independent thinker, it is not enough to disagree with the jingoism and nationalism which will only lead us to ruin. We need to get up and start screaming about this. Never shut up. If our message is twice as hard to swallow as the bland tripe sold to us by our leaders, it only means that we need to yell it twice as loud.