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Dick Cheney's assault on democracy
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Hardly a day goes by without a new revelation of former VP Dick Cheney’s abuse of power while in office, confirming that the man was as morally and intellectually corrupt as many of us imagined.
Today we learn that in 2002 Cheney wanted to send U.S. military troops to Buffalo, New York to arrest terror suspects, despite the fact this action is prohibited by the Constitution and various federal laws. No president had given the military permission to operate within America’s borders since Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War.
Incredibly, the cool heads in this episode turn out to be Condoleeza Rice, members of the Justice Department Criminal Division, and, someone slap me, President Bush. The terror suspects, later dubbed the Lackawanna Six, were subsequently arrested by the FBI.
Why Cheney felt it necessary to involve the military in an operation that state and federal law enforcement personnel were clearly capable of handling is still a mystery. The best explanation I can come up with is that Cheney and his supporters have no time for democracy.
Although the former VP was not strongly aligned with the Christian evangelical wing of the Republican Party, he was a powerful proponent of the decidedly undemocratic patriarchal organization of society. He believed the U.S. president should have virtually unfettered powers to make and break laws at his discretion, a view enthusiastically shared by despots and tyrants around the globe.
Democracy is messy, frustrating, and, ideally, inclusive, anathema to Cheney’s view of the “strong man” president issuing edicts and dictating the rules of the game.
Whether Cheney will ever be held accountable for his eight-year assault on the American Constitution is still uncertain, but hopefully future leaders will study Cheney’s actions in office as a lesson on how not to govern in a democratic society.
