Congress Must Not Abdicate to Bush

DALLAS, TX & CHAPEL HILL, NC (14 September) -- In the past two days, the pace of official Washington, of Congress and the White House, has quickened dramatically -- as quick as the relief effort atop the mountain of WTC rubble is slow.

While returning to business may be therapeutic, the President and Congress are moving too fast, trying to hammer out and then pass, as soon as Saturday, a resolution authorizing the President's use of force to prosecute what the administration has been calling "a new war on terrorism", what the President himself has called "the first war of the 21st century".

But the rest of the country has neither access to nor time to consider these deliberations, and it's ultimately the rest of the country which will be expected to honor the blank check Congress is about to sign over to the President.

While the country is concerned with the rescue and relief progress, with its grief and its mourning, and with the need to reacquire a sense of safety, politicians in Washington are preparing for a war. And formulating the boundaries of a new kind of war is not the kind of thing Washington should be left to do on its own.

The American people rightfully mourn the loss of innocent human life. But what the President wants -- by way of response and by way of authorization for the use of force -- puts many, many thousands of innocent humans in jeopardy of losing their lives. The administration has been hinting that "collateral damage" will have to be higher than the American people may be comfortable with. (Given Washington's commitment, from 1990 until the present day, to causing the unnecessary suffering and death of innocent Iraqis, as well as Washington's role in preserving the relative ignorance of the American people as to the results of this Iraqi policy, it's terrifying to think about what levels of "collateral damage" Bush and Powell have in mind. If the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children -- by starvation and easily preventable disease -- during the period 1991 to 1996, as a result of U.S.-imposed siege-like sanctions, did not merit public warnings about "collateral damage" from Bush, Baker, Clinton, Albright -- who admitted on 60 Minutes: "I think this is a very hard choice. But the price [the deaths of so many Iraqi children], we think the price is worth it" -- Bush, or Powell; then I shudder to think about the levels of carnage they intend to cause in this "new kind of war".)

As Jake Tapper reported yesterday,

Wednesday evening, the White House presented draft legislation to Congress that would give to him "the authority to use all necessary and appropriate force a) against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed or aided the attacks against the United States that occurred on September 11, 2001; and b) to deter and prevent any future acts of terrorism against the United States."

"It's that last clause," Tapper adds, "that members of the House and Senate, both Democrat and Republican, expressed concern about". Unlike some Democrats and Republicans, we are concerned about both clauses.

First, why should the president have the power to do whatever he wants against whomever he "determines authorized, committed or aided the attacks"? What could possibly be wrong with having him, dare we say it, consult with the Congress? Shouldn't the supposed representatives of the people have some formal and procedural voice in what counts as "necessary and appropriate" force? And how about some specificity as to whom may be targeted? After all, "aided" is very broad. What could be the harm in having a full, reasoned debate over what to do? And what could it harm to have that debate at some point after the wave of national rage and pain has crested?

It would be particularly good to have specific restrictions on the use of force. For example, no nukes. Again, if Bush wants to use tactical nukes, why shouldn't he have to come back to Congress for specific authorization?

Whatever kind of war the President makes of the inevitable U.S. response, it's clear that most, perhaps all of the overarching decisions do not require split second resolution. There's no issue of second guessing military commanders here; the decisions the Congress seems poised to relinquish to the President are explicitly political -- What are our goals? What is the mission? What war are we fighting? Against whom? What means are acceptable? And so on.

These are not properly Bush's decisions to make, and the Congress shouldn't abdicate to him.

Second, if the first clause is unacceptable, the second is even more unacceptable. If we can take the time to be a democracy with regard to the punishment of the actual attackers, we can take the time to decide what acts of violence we will commit, if any, in order to deter similar attacks. Indeed, we can take the time to ask whether such deterrance would even work, much less be legal, prudent, or moral.

Giving Bush carte blanche to use massive force at his sole discretion, in pursuit of vaguely defined goals, is clearly wrong. Even if he were saint-like, if he were Gandhi, it would be wrong. To abdicate the sovereignty of the people to one person is precisely to abandon the freedom so loudly praised by Bush himself.

Righteous sentiment doesn't necessarily make right action. Our anger and grief is righteous, but we have to ensure our response is the right one; it must at the very least be necessary and it must be proportionate to what we've suffered. It will not be so if we give way to the "unyielding anger" Bush seemed to pander to on Tuesday. The attempt -- no matter what noble motive propels it -- to circumvent the spirit of our democratic institutions in the wake of the attack is as blatant and hurtful a misuse of the deaths of innocents as the faux-relief-agency scams which divert our generosity into private profit. In the wake of this national tragedy, it's doubly awful that we have to remind our representatives that it's their job to represent us, to be our democratic proxies.

Despite our pain and grief, what we need now more than ever is deliberateness and deliberation; we need democracy and lots of it. We refuse to believe that, in the final analysis, when the tears have dried, the American people will want mere vengeance alone. In its rush to be (and to be seen as) unified and supportive of the President, Congress is in danger of abdicating its role and of allowing an angry, inexperienced President -- who's surrounded by defense and oil corporate interests -- to deliver vengeance, which means the deaths of lots of innocent people, an erosion of our civil liberties, and not much else.