Us against...us

WARNING: Blog entry contains high amounts of opinion, large quantities of politics and scattered sci-fi references...read at your own risk.

One of the great (and free!) podcasts I listen to regularly is "This American Life", a radio show that started on a local Chicago radio station and because of the internet has grown massively in popularity. I recently listened to an episode from back in March, called The Audacity of Government (3.28.08). They describe two specific cases of a much greater trend by the executive branch of our government over the last 7+ years of the Bush administration. Basically, the trend is that the executive branch has the power to do whatever it wants, and can ignore or re-interpret laws as it sees fit. For awhile, they "disguised" some of this in the name of national security - things that we saw in the Patriot Act, and other things that we saw happen after 9/11. Now they aren't even bothering to do that - they've gotten away with it for so long that we are just accepting these things as how it is.

The first instance that was described in the podcast was how the DOJ, under the authority of the president, decided to interfere and "re-interpret" a 100-year-old treaty with Canada on how the border was to be maintained. OK, so a border maintenance issue with Canada sounds pretty minor and insignificant, and it probably is. Which makes it even harder to understand why the DOJ would spend so much time and money fighting against the legally defined commission that is there to enforce this treaty - a treaty our president, Teddy Rosevelt, created 100 years ago, specifically so that this kind of thing didn't happen, so that the border was overseen by an independent, joint commission, and couldn't be interfered with by either government for political gain. The DOJ basically had the commissioner fired and replaced with someone who would do things "their way".

The second instance is recent "re-interpretation" by the immigration department, of the rules that grant citizenship to the spouse of an American citizen. This particular instance involved a woman from Brazil, who married an American man visiting Brazil and moved back to the US with him. They filed all of the necessary immigration paperwork, and waited for the immigration board interview, which had to take place sometime within two years of them being married. Once the interview is conducted, the person is granted citizenship at the end of the two-year period (as long as there is no other evidence that they were married just to get citizenship). During the two-year period, this woman got pregnant and the couple had a son. So there was certainly "evidence" that this was not just a marriage of convenience.

Eighteen months after they were married, the husband died unexpectedly of cancer. The woman and her son moved in with her in-laws, and after the funeral and getting everything in order, she went to the immigration office to explain the situation and have her interview (an interview which the immigration board had not done yet). They told her that since her husband was no longer alive she was no longer married to a US citizen and that her application would be denied and she would have to leave...when she asked about her son, they said "oh he can stay, but you have to leave". So, had the interview (which is done at a time arbitrarily chosen by the immigration department in those two years) been done before her husband died, she would have gotten citizenship, but since they hadn't done it yet, she was out of luck. She found a lawyer who had argued one of these cases before (FYI there are now 134 of these cases that are going forward as part of a class action lawsuit) and they took it to court and won...and then the immigration department told her that they were not going to abide by the ruling. Period.

So the question is, can anyone stop this? What happens when the most powerful branch of government in the most powerful country in the world says they are going to ignore a law or treaty or rule? In 2004, President Bush pulled us out of a ballistic missile treaty that was signed and ratified by congress years before. Seems like the president can't just do that right? Without congress's approval? Apparently he can - because who is going to stop him? When the UN voted not to go to war with Iraq, we went ahead and did it anyway. Why? Because who can stop us?

The effects of the past 7 years are not just the loss of 7 years of progress to our country. In fact, we won't know the effects of the last 7 years until we can put them in the context of history somewhere down the line. And I am sure we are going to feel the effects of the last 7 years for decades to come. This is not about this party or that party. We're regressing civilization back hundreds of years, to the days of whoever is strongest, biggest, has the best weapons, biggest army, etc. gets their way. I am not so stupid to think that the world isn't always going to work this way to some degree. But didn't the World Wars teach us anything? Didn't history, with the rise and fall of all its dictators, teach us anything? Eventually the people "on the outside" will get tired of the big guy, the bully, doing what it wants, and it will fight back. I call this the "Independence Day" syndrome. OK so the movie really wasn't that good, and was full of things that probably couldn't happen (including being able to upload a virus to an alien ship using a Mac laptop running TCP/IP, but I digress...) The movie showed how a giant "enemy" from the outside who was imposing its will on the earth caused the people of the earth to put aside their differences and fight back and win. We see this throughout history. Dictators are always eventually overthrown. That's why our constitution was created the way it was - to try and ensure that our country would never have a dictatorship - that no one person or branch of government had too much power. We were supposed to be smarter - we were supposed to have learned from history.

I'm not trying to advocate any conspiracy theories, or worry about "Big Brother" or anything like that. We, the people, still have the one thing that "the people in power" have to have to be in power - our vote. Our system still puts us, the people, in power IF WE CHOOSE TO USE IT.

I'll leave you with two of my favorite quotes pertaining to this subject from science fiction. I love science fiction because it can make commentary on social and political issues in future hypothetical settings (and also show us that history DOES repeat itself if we let it).

First, one of my favorite episodes of Star Trek Deep Space Nine - Season 4 Episode 12, "Paradise Lost". One of the StarFleet admirals decides that in order to protect Earth from the dominion, he needs to get it under military rule - and he goes to great lengths to scare the federation president and everyone into believing that's the only way Earth will be safe. Sisko sees what's going on and asks him "So you are going to destroy paradise to save it?"

Second, in Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. The senate chancellor Palpetine, over the course of the first 3 movies, creates a "threat" to the republic and leads the senate to believe that he needs to create a grand army of the republic, and that he is going to reorganize the republic into a Galactic Empire [with him as the leader] to ensure safety and stability. Padme says "So this is how liberty dies...with thunderous applause" as the senate claps and cheers.