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Wednesday, June 06, 2007 Sandy Levinson “The Republican Administration has shown itself to be completely incompetent to the point that, of Republicans in Iowa, fifty-two per cent thought we should be out of Iraq in six months. This Administration is beyond the pale in terms of arrogance and incompetence. This guy thinks he’s a monarch, and that’s scary as hell.” It would be easy to dismiss this as just another "partisan rant" from me or one of my liberal- Democratic friends save for the fact that it was said by former Oklahoma Republican Rep. Mickey Edwards. Jeffrey Goldberg, the author of the New Yorker article on "the Republican implosion," notes that Edwards, "who left Congress in 1993 and now teaches at Princeton , is helping to lead an effort among some conservatives to curtail the President’s power in such areas as warrantless wiretapping." Or consider the founding of a new organization devoted to the "American Freedom Agenda," which includes among its leaders former Reagan Administration DOJ lawyer Bruce Fein, former Georgia Republican Congressman Bob Barr, veteran conservative fund-raiser Richard Viguerie and David Keene, the former aide to Bob Dole who for many years has served as chairman of the American Conservative Union. John Nichols has published a piece for The Nation on this group, who are far more savage in their criticism of the Administration than any "mainstream Democrat" has thought prudent to be.
"The most conservative principles of the Constitution have been repeatedly violated in the last several years," says Fein. " Founding Fathers engrafted a system of checks and review of one branch by another -- a system of due process safeguards against injustice that is likely to occur because of prejudice and fear. And those checks and balances have eroded enormously over the last several years, particularly since 9/11."
Viguerie is even blunter, suggesting that "a constitutional crisis... has developed to alarming proportion under President George W. Bush."
Rejecting the suggestion that conservatives must remain silent because Bush is supposedly one of their own, Viguerie says, "Conservatives must not fail to oppose the massive expansion of presidential powers out of fear they will be aid and comfort to the Left. Concern about one branch of government acquiring excessive power should not be the providence of liberals, moderates, or conservatives. It must be the concern of all Americans who value liberty…"
Barr echoes that view, arguing that, "" cannot sit by and wait thirty years for court decisions. We cannot wait until another four-year election cycle is concluded to have the Bill of Rights restored and defended."
Some people who read (andrespond) to my (and other's) posts on Balkinization believe that our harsh criticisms of Bush and his Administration demonstrate that we are crazed lefties unwilling to stand up for America. My friend Michael Paulsen, responding to a lecture that I gave at the University of Georgia, accused me of engaging in a "partisan rant" when I pointed to some of the Schmittian overtones of Bush's (or, more to the point, John Yoo's) view of executive power under the Constitution. So how, then, does Michael (or any other Republican Party loyalist) analyze Edwards, Fein, Viguerie, Barr, and Keene? Indeed, the ACLU has a whole web site of quotations from "Conservative and Republican Voices Against President Bush’s NSA Spying Program. George Will, for example, refers to the "monarchical doctrine" emanating from the White House these days. And Richard Epstein is only the most prominent academic conservative to join in raising questions about the Administration's commitment to basic constitutional norms. He has, for example, described as "scandalous" the Administration's attempt to sidestep Federalist #69 while offering an ostensibly "originalist" claim that the President is best interpreted as the equivalent of an elected monarch empowered with a Lockean (or Schmittean) "prerogative" to do whatever he/she thinks "necessary" in exigent circumstances. So are all of these well-known Republican conservatives simple apostates, or must even Republicans pay them heed?
There were several Republicans who in 2004 admitted that they were rooting for John Kerry, as they were afraid what another four years of the Bush Administration would do for the Republican Party and for conservative principles. Well, they (and we) have found out. 2008 is shaping up as an ever more interesting "constitutional moment."
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