WurfWhile

“Holy Freakin’ #@%&, Bush Wanted War Powers in the U.S.” is the story Attytood sees when reading that President George W. Bush sought “war-making authority ‘in the United States.’” The actual Washington Post story is framed as part of the domestic spying/FISA debate and sources a column in the paper by former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle.

While I noted in other news sources that the Bush Administration sought war-making powers in the United States, I got sidetracked by the spying issue. Attytood was right, I missed the real story.

Here’s a snippet of Daschle’s remarks:

“Just before the Senate acted on this compromise resolution [the ‘2001 legislation authorizing the use of force against al Qaeda’], the White House sought one last change. Literally minutes before the Senate cast its vote, the administration sought to add the words ‘in the United States and’ after ‘appropriate force’ in the agreed-upon text. This last-minute change would have given the president broad authority to exercise expansive powers not just overseas — where we all understood he wanted authority to act — but right here in the United States, potentially against American citizens. I could see no justification for Congress to accede to this extraordinary request for additional authority. I refused.

The shock and rage we all felt in the hours after the attack were still fresh. America was reeling from the first attack on our soil since Pearl Harbor…. Even so, a strong bipartisan majority could not agree to the administration’s request for an unprecedented grant of authority.

The Bush administration now argues those powers were inherently contained in the resolution adopted by Congress — but at the time, the administration clearly felt they weren’t or it wouldn’t have tried to insert the additional language.

All Americans agree that keeping our nation safe from terrorists demands aggressive and innovative tactics. This unity was reflected in the near-unanimous support for the original resolution and the Patriot Act in those harrowing days after Sept. 11. But there are right and wrong ways to defeat terrorists, and that is a distinction this administration has never seemed to accept. Instead of employing tactics that preserve Americans’ freedoms and inspire the faith and confidence of the American people, the White House seems to have chosen methods that can only breed fear and suspicion.

If the stories in the media over the past week are accurate, the president has exercised authority that I do not believe is granted to him in the Constitution, and that I know is not granted to him in the law that I helped negotiate with his counsel and that Congress approved in the days after Sept. 11. For that reason, the president should explain the specific legal justification for his authorization of these actions, Congress should fully investigate these actions and the president’s justification for them, and the administration should cooperate fully with that investigation.

In the meantime, if the president believes the current legal architecture of our country is insufficient for the fight against terrorism, he should propose changes to our laws in the light of day.

That is how a great democracy operates. And that is how this great democracy will defeat terrorism.”

When one thinks about what this really means, an American Administration asking to be able to wage war on the American people, it is almost unbelievable. It makes the paranoid seem prescient. This isn’t partisan. I would like to think that Americans of all political persuasions would find this abhorrent - it digs deep and strikes at the root of what it is to be American. By definition liberty ends where unlimited government begins.