The Bush Legal Legacy

It is important for me to continue to return to this subject because my life experience is that lessons not learned are doomed to be repeated. For me, this is not a partisan issue. I would be demanding of any incoming president, Congress, and our nation as a whole that we hold any administration of any party accountable - and especially in the light of the enormity of the breach of law over the past eight years.

In a particularly powerful Journal from December 12, 2008, Bill Moyers sat down with author, political commentator, and popular Salon.com blogger Glenn Greenwald who asks: Are we a nation ruled by men or by laws? A former constitutional and civil rights lawyer, Greenwald looks at the legacy of the Bush Administration, the prospects for President-elect Obama's cabinet choices, as well as the possibilities for government accountability.

GLENN GREENWALD: Well, if you look at things that people have said who are responsible for what I call the war on the Constitution, before 9/11, what you find is that these ideas, including removing Saddam Hussein, but beyond that, wildly expanding executive power, erecting a wall of secrecy around our government such that transparency is virtually non-existent. Empowering the president to ignore literally laws that are passed by Congress in the name of national security.

These ideas were implemented after 9/11 and using the 9/11 attacks as justification. But the ideologues who implemented them, Dick Cheney and David Addington and John Yoo and the whole cast of right-wing ideologues who fill the Justice Department, have been advocating these ideas, which for decades were fringe and discredited ideas long before 9/11 and just like the idea of remove Saddam Hussein, they were empowered to institute them as a result of these crises.

BILL MOYERS: Well, you were saying they were discredited. But all wartime presidents expand the powers of the office. Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon. I mean, there's something inherent in war and the expansion of powers. Are you saying that Bush and Cheney took it further?

GLENN GREENWALD: I'm saying they took it to an entirely different level. What we have, in the last eight years, is not merely a case of individual and isolated law breaking. It's a declaration of war on the whole idea of a law itself, on the idea that our political leaders are constrained in any way by the limitations of the American people imposed through our Congress. The rule of law has essentially ceased to exist. And that I do think is quite new.

More:
THE BUSH LEGAL LEGACY
GLENN GREENWALD

The entire December 12th Journal was very powerful. For more, please go here:
BAILOUT ANALYSIS: Georgetown University's legal and finance scholar Emma Coleman Jordan takes Bill Moyers through recent news on the bailouts as big business begs for more.
BAILOUT HEARINGS TIMELINE: Follow the course of the bailout hearings — bargains, media moments and more.
FCC UPDATE: Bill Moyers on a new report about the FCC.

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"True peace is not merely the absence of tension: it is the presence of justice. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly." ~ Martin Luther King, jr.

"We do not have a money problem in America. We have a values and priorities problem." ~ Marian Wright Edelman