The violations of the U.S. Constitution during the 8-years of George W. Bush’s “Unitary Presidency,” the numbers of laws that were broken, including the arrogant contravention of international treaties, conventions and agreements, cumulatively represent the most serious breach of the public’s trust in the history of our democracy. The seeds of lies and deceit, furrowed into unconstitutional acts, and fertilized with ideological manure, brought forth a blighted harvest of one failed initiative after another. That they were moral and ethical violations as well, only amplified the offenses. Breaking civil and common law will earn prosecutions and civil suits. Breaking Constitutional law should certainly likewise earn a reckoning. If civil law is not enforced, law and order will break down, and chaos results. If the Constitution is not defended, social and governing structures, including civil law, break down. The result is anarchy.

To those who scoff and believe that it can’t happen here, I suggest you look at the record. Look at all of the things that have occurred during the Bush Era that were never supposed to happen in America, but have. Spying on Americans was supposed to have stopped after Joe McCarthy’s communist witch hunts in the 1950’s, and certainly after Richard Nixon, when laws were enacted and a special court was created to safeguard the rights to privacy, laws cynically broken by Bush. America was never supposed to cross the line on torture. America was never supposed to be an aggressor nation. Safeguards were supposed to protect our investment markets from another Great Depression, but they were relaxed and rescinded. Deregulation denuded the power invested in federal oversight agencies. In its stead came the myth of self-regulation, which really meant “anything goes,” and as a result, we all stood at the brink of an even greater depression.

The great middle class, the very engine of our economy and productivity, is struggling against forces of extinction, having been pummeled by an unfair tax burden, abandoned by disappearing jobs, battered by evaporating health insurance coverage, and beaten into submission by bankruptcies and foreclosures. While the richest Americans were amply rewarded during the Bush Era, the floor was falling out from beneath the middle class. The bottom tiers were being pushed backward, swelling the ranks of the working poor, setting off a chain-reaction that expanded the numbers of poverty-stricken Americans, particularly children. There were plenty of advocates to be found in Washington for the moneyed elite and the well-connected, but a paucity of advocates for the middle class and the poor.

America is not supposed to be a 2-class society of those who have and those who do not, of those who own anything they want and those who owe on everything they have. History is replete with examples of societies built on a 2-tiered class system. They did not survive without a middle class. They also did not survive without some respect for human rights.

Basic human rights were denied “illegal enemy combatants” in violation of numerous international agreements and our own laws. We were not showing the world how democracy works when it was threatened. We were showing the world that the United States of America was a society corrupted by fear-based rationalizations, no different than any other autocratic government, where it’s all too easy to find reasons to abuse people. The Bush Administration took the easy way out. It wasn’t fighting terrorism. It was joining it. Torture is terrorism. The rule of law was overruled, and as America’s legitimacy was compromised, so too were the rights of every American, including the right to privacy, the right to protest, the right to petition, and for hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions; the right to vote.
To deny just one person just one constitutional right threatens all of the rights of all Americans. There can be no striving for betterment, for a fairer society, for achievement, for human rights, for high standards; in short, the fulfillment of what the world knows as “The American Dream,” unless and until every right and guarantee in the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights is fully valued.

A new Presidential Administration is a start. But “hope” and “change” cannot be realized or implemented unless we put things back in order, unless we work to restore those principles and traits that made our nation the land of the possible, where opportunity, discovery, innovation and core values grew and thrived. The primacy of the Constitution and the rule of law must be fully reinstated. That requires holding those who were to blame for its erosion, answerable for their actions. Remediation requires a faultfinding process. You can’t fix something and prevent it from happening again if you don’t know how and why it was done and by whom. If necessary, it requires prosecution, not a plea bargain. If necessary, it requires punishment, not absolution. If necessary, it requires imprisonment, not a pardon. If leaders are expected to lead by example, then they should also answer for official misconduct for the same very good reason—to make of them an example.

The Founders understood that basic principle. It’s why they prominently inserted a device to protect both the Constitution and the American people from despotic or criminal behavior by public officials—impeachment. Since Congress refused to do its duty and uphold the Constitution by impeaching those who didn’t, the time has come to pursue another avenue—impaneling special investigative commissions and special prosecutors. To that end, there must be a concerted effort made to answer the hard questions, including the 3 most profound of all. Were war crimes committed? Was treason committed? If so, who was responsible?
To do nothing creates 2 detrimental consequences. One is that specific criminal activity is sanctioned, and the message to everyone is that it’s okay to break the law, to ignore the Constitution for any invented “reason.” The other is to enshrine those transgressions, giving them the significance of past practice.