It is striking how little any of these candidates have been asked about issues of executive power and presidential lawbreaking, and none -- other than Chris Dodd and, to a lesser extent, Ron Paul -- has made those issues significant part of their campaign.

This is clearly an accurate view in my opinion. And while some--very few--of the candidates have deigned to say anything regarding these basic issues of constitutional balance and lawlessness, Al Gore has not been signing pledges or placing vaguely-worded phrases in buried paragraphs. He has spoken out, loudly and clearly, on all these issues. For example:

"An executive who arrogates to himself the power to ignore the legitimate legislative directives of the Congress or to act free of the check of the judiciary becomes the central threat that the Founders sought to nullify in the Constitution - an all-powerful executive too reminiscent of the King from whom they had broken free. In the words of James Madison, "the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny."

(from: http://draftgore.com/exec_power.htm)

Gore's clearly-expressed positions on these and other issues of concern to many Unclaimed Territory readers place him in a separate and highly preferable class of one among potential american presidents for 2008--of any political party.

Nearly two years ago now, Gore spoke to the American Constituional Society on Martin Luther King day, reminding us why FISA was passed in the first place:

And on this particular Martin Luther King Day, it is especially important to recall that for the last several years of his life, Dr. King was illegally wiretapped-one of hundreds of thousands of Americans whose private communications were intercepted by the U.S. government during that period.

The FBI privately labeled King the "most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country" and vowed to "take him off his pedestal." The government even attempted to destroy his marriage and tried to blackmail him into committing suicide.

This campaign continued until Dr. King's murder. The discovery that the FBI conducted this long-running and extensive campaign of secret electronic surveillance designed to infiltrate the inner workings of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and to learn the most intimate details of Dr. King's life, was instrumental in helping to convince Congress to enact restrictions on wiretapping.

And somewhat prophetically, he warned:

Fifth, any telecommunications company that has provided the government with access to private information concerning the communications of Americans without a proper warrant should immediately cease and desist their complicity in this apparently illegal invasion of the privacy of American citizens.

Freedom of communication is an essential prerequisite for the restoration of the health of our democracy.

We are now seeing Congress perhaps caving in on this very topic.

The full text of Gore's speech (there are others to be found there as well) is available at the link above. It does not take very much reading there to clearly contrast Gore's superior qualifications with those of any presidential contender.

So while we can applaud the positions of Dodd and Paul, and even the fleeting afterthoughts tossed off by Obama, Clinton and Edwards, all these pale when compared to Gore--who has said what needs to be said--louder, clearer, better, and earlier.

Today's piece is an awfully good one, in that it shifts our gaze somewhat to congress, and its continued failure as a constitutional branch of government to address the issues of torture, loss of process, and other human/civil rights issues.

We are, and have been, at a divide between two courses. The course identified with torture leads towards the end of our republic and the creation of some new and monstrous national entity that will terrorize both the world and its own citizens. The course rejecting torture leads us in a better direction.

Here's a recent court statement regarding due process/civil liberties issue:

"This is the destiny of democracy, as not all means are acceptable to it, and not all practices employed by its enemies are open before it. Although a democracy must often fight with one hand tied behind its back, it nonetheless has the upper hand. Preserving the Rule of Law and recognition of an individual's liberty constitutes an important component in its understanding of security. At the end of the day they (add to) its strength."

Don't recognize it? The leftist, soft-on-terror, Osama-loving, Iran-appeasing court issuing this statement was the Supreme Court of Israel, 1999.

Congress would do well to listen, and consider what it is doing. Greenwald is absolutely correct, and in fact the statement is overdue. Failure to act will lead to congressional--and Democratic Party--co-ownership of all these evils.

Even if Gore will not enter the race (and it is unclear but unlikely that he will), he can be drafted. There are a few websites with info on this. A google search of "draft gore" 2008 brings back over 100,000 hits. But one is www.draftgore.com.

Greenwald's post today highlights how important the next president could be regarding specific issues of habeas, torture, and other lawlessness. By this, I mean that it may be left to the next president to decide which powers he or she deems constitutionally appropriate, rather than a congress-- which may continue to be insulated from the will of the country and basically dysfunctional (even if it builds a larger Dem. majority). The next president may well have to convince congress to strip the executive of these inappropriate powers.

In such a situation, Gore is by far the most likely, and I believe the most able, to strip his own office in this way. He has already done something akin to this once, after the 2000 election. He has shown that he values some things over power.

In any event, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that Gore holds the constitution closer to his heart than Dodd holds them to his ass.