No reasonable person can dispute that in the absence of genuine compulsion (and perhaps even then), the administration will continue to treat "the law" as something optional, and their power as absolute.

I'd prefer explicit use of the i-word here, but fair enough.

The democratic calculus regarding the Constitutional Crisis currently sitting in their laps is a complete mystery to me. While many Americans feel outrage about the ever-more-flagrant behavior of the administration, we unfortunately cannot feel outrage for the congress. They are the ones who have sustained the institutional damage and insult. They are the ones who must be willing to see that this is not about George Bush and Dick Cheney as individuals. It is not about those two men, but about what the nature--the very definition--of the Executive and Congress will be going forward.

Waiting for the next election will solve nothing, regardless of the "victor". That election will by itself do nothing to arrest the cancerous growth of the Presidential power and the equally cancerous withering of Congress as co-equal constitutional entities.

The only cure I can envision is impeachment and removal. The issue must be addressed while this president is still in office, so that the claims being made can be clearly refuted by Congress, and, importantly, so Congress can be seen to have maintained its constitutional powers.

Some will argue that conviction in this senate is impossible, and therefore the attempt should simply be left untried. I couldn't disagree more. The congress simply must at least make the attempt to maintain its constitutional position.

Congress And What Army?

I hope, if such a confrontation reaches its ultimate conclusion, that the soldiers who would be required to arrest the President remember that their oath is to support and defend the Constitution, not the office of President or its current inhabitant.

I hope.

except from a slightly different angle, i.e., will we one day be cheering a military coup to restore our democracy?

> has suggetsed that within the year, the US will be a police state

What exactly constitutes a police state? Is it one in which the government is entirely within its legal rights to grab any number of citizens off the street and lock them away forever without ever answering to anyone? Is it one in which a single man is allowed to issue any order he wishes on any topic and nobody else is allowed to contest it? Is it one in which the military commander can simply declare war on anyone he wants for any reason and the populace has no choice but to comply?

Why do these metrics sound so very familiar? Could it be because Bush & Cheney have already claimed exactly those powers?

What's the price of gas these days?

The reason I ask is closely related to this administrations masterful Overton Window manipulations.

The oil barrons jacked up the price of gas last year to over $3/gallon, and everybody freaked out, it was all over the news, sirens blazing, alarms firing.

Guess what? The price of gas is now over $3/gallon and there isn't a peep to be heard. Move the price to $3.75/G, then back it down to $3.25/G, and nobody will be bothered anymore by the $3.25/G

Classic.

So, this administration is introducing radical concepts regarding the rule of law, and there is protest. Then they relax just a bit, and the protest stops. Mission accomplished. Window moved to the right, to more power for the executive branch, to more immunity from prosecution. The radical ideas are now mearly questionable, the questionable are mainstream and soon to be de facto policy.

If we just keep being reasonable, we will never stop moving backwards, inch by inch.

If this were a rational world, and we were dealing with rational people, you would think Bush-loving conservatives would be frightened to death of a Democratic President and an entire executive branch that was above the law and not accountable to Congress or the Courts. But that doesn’t seem to disturb them.

Indeed, some of them have convinced themselves that this is exactly what our founding fathers wanted when they wrote the Constitution.

On National Review’s “Ship of Fools” the author Hari asked those on board why liberals were like they were, to which a man named Dave responded:

"The liberals don't believe in the constitution. They don't believe in what the founders wanted – a strong executive," he announces, to nods.

I’m simply unable to process this sort of thinking. I attribute that to still being in what the Bushies refer to as “the reality-based community” where we “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.''

Obviously, they’ve not only created their “own reality” they’ve also created their very own Constitution.

This is a brilliant summary of the administration's view of law and power. I don't understand why Congress is not outraged; I frankly don't understand why even Republicans in Congress (except those who have presidential ambitions and are hoping to sit in the catbird seat themselves some day) are not outraged because they are castrated and disempowered by this executive philosophy as much as Democrats are. And I mostly don't understand how we, the people, have fallen into humble acquiescence to the arrogant and in-your-face destruction of our constitutional rights.

I keep writing to my congressmen. I get canned answers thanking me for letting them know my point of view. It must be getting to be time to march. It's way past time to vote them all out and get a fresh start.

I think I need a little bit of clarification on what the legal issues surrounding an invocation of executive privilege on documents subpoenaed by Congress. If a person is ordered by a Congressional subpoena to hand over documents, what can the President legally do to stop those documents from being handed over if he wishes to invoke executive privilege? I have gathered from what I've read lately that Congress can hold that individual in contempt for not providing those documents, but what can the President do to stop an individual from complying with a subpoena when he really does have a right to withhold documents from the scrutiny of Congress? Is it possible that the individual could face a situation of choosing between criminal charges pressed by Congress and criminal charges pressed by the President?