The Constitution: It had a good run

8/31/08

So many memories.

All the focus is on choosing his successor, but who will take a moment to pay homage to the White House's current occupant, the only president we've got?

President Bush's term has taken us places we never thought we'd go. Who knew eight years ago we'd have national discussions about torturing people?

Everyone is familiar with the Bush team's greatest hits, where torture, amazingly, doesn't even come out on top. How can you do worse than violating one of the universally understood lines between civilization and barbarism?

Well, starting unnecessary wars is one way. With the end of the occupation maybe, finally in sight, Iraq apologists are scrambling to find something to hold onto there, something that was worth the thousands of deaths and the leveling of a nation.

They're coming up short. We were lied into a war we didn't have to fight, and we'll be paying for it for decades.

But there are stories from the Bush years that go beyond the ones we'll all remember. One of my favorites, which might encapsulate the disaster and how we got there better than anything else, involves a scandal that, in a sane world, would have brought down the presidency. In the world we live in, it hardly made a ripple.

This one was about turning the Justice Department into an arm of the Republican National Committee. U.S. attorneys were fired for insufficient partisanship, career positions were illegally filled on the basis of politics, and more. All impeachable offenses, but come on — as scandals go, it can't compete with waging war based on the president's gut.

This particular story involved a former White House political director named Sara Taylor, who testified before Congress last year on the firing of U.S. attorneys. She didn't want to talk about it, and explained herself like this: "I took an oath. And I take that oath to the president very seriously."

That's it.

That says it all. Every catastrophe of the past eight years wrapped up in one short sentence.

Vermont Sen. Pat Leahy, to his credit, called her on it. "I was really struck by one of your answers," he said to her. "You said, 'I took an oath to the president, and I take that oath very seriously.' Did you mean, perhaps, you took an oath to the Constitution?"

Taylor: "I — yes, you're correct. [What I] said is that I took an oath; I took that oath seriously. And I believe that taking that oath means that I need to respect, and do respect, my service to the president."

Leahy: "No. The oath says that you take an oath to uphold and protect the Constitution of the United States. That is your paramount duty. I know the president refers to the government as being his government. It's not. It's the government of the people of America. Your oath is not to uphold the president. Nor is mine to uphold the Senate. My oath, like your oath, is to uphold the Constitution."

That's not, of course, how the Bush people saw it. Yes, this is supposed to be a nation of laws. It's actually, to get technical about it, one of the basic tenets of Western civilization — the Magna Carta and all that. But who cares?

The Constitution, court precedent, laws passed by Congress and signed by earlier presidents — even those signed by Bush himself, what with his creative use of "signing statements" to undercut his own signature — meant nothing, and continue to mean nothing.

Political operatives throw around accusations of anti-Americanism with impunity, but if anything is anti-American, it's this. The country has made it more than 200 years with the rule of law, but the Bush administration threw it in the trash.

What's somehow worse is that they not only went from the rule of law to the rule of man, they resorted to the rule of this man. If you're going to toss aside the basic principles of the greatest, freest country on the face of the earth, why would you do it for George W. Bush? This is the best they could come up with?

Hugh S. Bailey is assistant editorial page editor of the Connecticut Post. You can reach him at 203-330-6233 or by e-mail at hbailey@ctpost.com.