Holy Crap, I agree with George Will!

In his Newsweek column last week, George F. Will writes about “Why Voters Should Listen to Chris Dodd.”

In response to a question about what makes him angry, something rare enough to be riveting appeared—unfeigned indignation about the lawlessness, as he sees it, of the Bush-Cheney doctrine of inherent, and inherently illimitable, presidential powers.

Will explains that Senator Dodd is publishing a book soon about his father, a prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials:

Nuremberg, says Dodd, was “the place where America’s moral authority in the second half of the 20th century was born.” That perishable resource has, he thinks, been squandered by Bush administration decisions inimical to the Constitution and international law.

Will further writes that Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson (one of the judges who presided at Nuremberg), rejected Harry Truman’s argument that he could use his powers as commander in chief to seize steel mills to prevent a strike during wartime, writing, “No penance would ever expiate the sin against free government of holding that a president can escape control of executive power by law through assuming his military roll.”

Let us remember that.

Some thanks…

P.S. Thanks to A Blog Without A Bicycle for tagging me as one of her five choices for the Thinking Blogger Award. Glad I can be thought-provoking.

A Tale of Two Parties: Part II

Meanwhile, the Economist takes a look at why, as it says, “the conservative movement that for a generation has been the source of the Republican Party’s strength is in the dumps.” A good read.

A Tale of Two Parties: Part I

So, Markos Moulitsas (the founder of the dailykos) picked up on Harold Ford and Gov. Martin O’Malley’s plea for Democrats to remember the center that I discussed the other day. ‘Kos attacked the centrist Democratic Leadership Council (of which Ford is the chair) last week for leading Democrats in the wrong direction, saying it’s the progressive wing of the party (well represented on his blog) that will bring Democrats victory in 2008.

We didn’t flinch from our position on the war. We held the line on social security, even as the Very Serious People told us it was irresponsible. We championed Dean when we were told it would kill the party. We championed Lamont when we were told it would cost us the Senate. We celebrated Nancy Pelosi when we were told we would be demonized as “San Francisco liberals”…We helped build this majority. Not the DLC’s 350 or so members. This is no longer their party. And as such, we can look forward to finally being truly competitive for years to come.

To make things even better, Moulitsas and Ford duked it out on Meet the Press on Sunday.

The Ghost of Democrats Past

The WaPo’s Richard Cohen “kicks the Democrats in the pants for forgetting who they represent” in his column today. A bit of an odd column, but he gets his point across.

Capturing the “Progressive Center”

Martin O’Malley, Governor of Maryland, and Harold Ford, Jr. plea with liberals not to abandon the center in the 2008 election season. We can’t rely on the failures of President Bush to keep the Democratic Party in the majority, they argue; Democrats must set out to build a majority around the “progressive center” – something they say many of the current candidates are doing:

That’s why they have begun putting forward smart, New Democrat plans to cap and trade carbon emissions, give more Americans the chance to earn their way through college, achieve universal health care through shared responsibility, increase national security by rebuilding our embattled military and enable all Americans who work full time to lift themselves out of poverty.

The funny thing is, I feel like this propositions would sound quite leftist to a Republican. Ford and Gov. O’Malley praise the “sensible agenda” of President Clinton and tell current Democrats to learn from it. Could it be that the truth is finally seeping out – that sensible, responsible policies that would strengthen America at home and abroad are “blue” policies, that your average American has a set of moral beliefs that should thrust him to the left side of the ballot?

Another noteworthy point: O’Malley and Ford give shout-outs to three famous Democrats: Franklin Roosevelt, Bill Clinton, and…

America is facing challenges as great as we’ve ever seen — a war against Islamist radicals who would destroy our way of life; global economic competition that demands we raise our game; and a quest for energy independence and efficiency that Al Gore has shown us could make or break our planet.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: if Al Gore enters this race, he can win.

Sen. Russ Feingold = Still Awesome

Senator Russ Feingold expressed his outrage on Monday about President Bush’s latest grab for power, in a column at the Huffington Post:

The FISA bill Congress passed late last week was the latest example of the administration exploiting a legitimate problem to make an outrageous power grab – and unfortunately, it was also just the latest example of Congress giving in to the president’s fear-mongering.

Though Sen. Feingold doesn’t phrase it quite like this, I get the feeling he agrees with my sentiment: what good is it having a Democratic Congress if we’re not going to use it?

“And this is how democracy dies…

“…to thunderous applause.”

The Democratic Party, the Republican Party, and the U.S. Senate failed the United States of America last night, tearing up the Constitution and replacing it with a dictatorship. Last night, the Senate approved a bill that would give the President greater power to expand his warrantless wiretapping program, removing requirements for court approval of his monitoring of phone calls and e-mails.

This is illegal. This is unconstitutional. And it is a disgusting display of the politics of fear mongering. Trent Lott warned that if the Senate did not pass this bill, “the disaster could be on our doorstep,” going on to say of himself and his fellow Congressmen, “I think it would be good to leave town in August, and it would probably be good to stay out until September the 12th.”

No Senator, I think you stay out permanently. You and the other Senators who voted with you (I’ll post the list as soon as it’s up on senate.gov).

Jonathan Turley, Professor of Constitutional Law at George Washington University, explained on “Countdown” the other night just how absurd it is that civil libertarians are fighting to make Bush get approval from the FISA court for surveillance of communications.

Before 9/11, many of us were arguing – and still argue – that a secret court is…un-American in our system of law, and that’s a court that was created to circumvent the Fourth Amendment. The fact that we’re struggling to use the FISA court really shows how far we’ve gone.

What is Progressivism?

A while back, I asked “What is progressive government?” Pam Pohly at The Everyday Citizen provides some insight, from her own experience and from a variety of other sources. One of her suggestions coms from the Center for American Progress:

Founded on the ideals of the progressive movement at the turn of the century, today’s progressive movement believes that an open and effective government can improve the lives of everyday Americans by playing an active role in solving social and economic problems…. In other words, a progressive is someone who is idealistic enough to believe that things can be better and pragmatic enough to get it done.

It’s not the size of the government that matters…

It’s how you use it?

E.J. Dionne provides some interesting commentary in his WaPo column Wednesday about the strange bedfellows some political topics can make, saying that the “big government/small government” dichotomy that is supposed to separate liberals and conservatives is just a myth. Small-government Republicans teaming up with progressive Democrats to attack farm subsidies, and all that. What I found most interesting:

The same inconsistencies apply even to that dreaded concept “socialized medicine.” Last week, American auto companies opened what will be difficult negotiations with the United Auto Workers union. The toughest issue will be health care. General Motors paid $4.8 billion for health care last year, including $3 billion for retirees. Is it any wonder that the good capitalists at GM and the other car companies would love the government to pick up some of these costs?

“There’s been an enormous paradigm shift in the business community,” says Gov. Jennifer Granholm, a Democrat who has led Michigan during the crisis in the auto industry. Health care, she said, has “gone from being a moral issue to being an economic issue,” meaning that business leaders who once had objections in principle to government-led health-care reform now have a powerful interest in making it happen.