The War on Terror Is Over

And the terrorists won.

We were told that there would be no great final victory in the War on Terror, no symbolic surrender on the deck of an aircraft carrier. But that isn't true. We saw something very like that yesterday in the U.S. Senate. And it was America that surrendered; surrendered every good thing we ever believed in.

The Senate voted yesterday to abolish the Constitution of the United States. Since the terrorists "hate us for our freedoms," the surrender of those freedoms represents the fulfillment of their war aims. Senators voting for the bill have therefore given aid and comfort to the enemy. Not only does this place them at risk under the treason statute, but under the provisions of the new law the President has the power to label them enemy combatants, place them in prison for the rest of their lives, and torture them. Congratulations.

If that sounds a little dramatic, it should. This execrable piece of legislation gives the President the power to imprison American citizens without a trial or due process. It prevents the Courts from intervening, giving sole discretion to the Executive. Any person found "materially supporting" terrorism can be thrown in jail forever, without recourse to a lawyer or the courts. The interpretation of the phrase "materially supporting" is left up to the President. Furthermore, the Congress has now become the first legislative body in the history of the United States to endorse the practice of torture.

Yesterday was saw the most important vote in the U.S. Senate since the cloture vote on the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This is as shameful a day as that was a glorious one. This generation of Americans will be apologizing for this event for the rest of their lives. In the future we will look in the face of evil and see that it is our own face.

Yesterday saw the humiliation of the Congress, the emasculation of the Courts, the elevation of the President to unfettered powers, the gutting of our civil liberties, and the abandonment of our identity as a free people. As far as I'm concerned, the people who voted for this bill don't even deserve the name "American." I didn't think Americans were cowards so petrified by their fears that they were willing to be sold into slavery. Make no mistake - we have exchanged the prospect of physical harm for the reality of oppression.

We have witnessed the final debasement of the Republican Party. I am not surprised that they wrote this bill. They have been so corrupted by their ambition that I have come to expect anything of them. I will of course take great pleasure in ridiculing those Republicans who trumpet their commitment to small government. But I must confess a certain pang that the party that brought us Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt has become the enemy of liberty. They are just a party of little Richard Nixons now, not a man of parts among them.

It is the Democratic Party that has broken my heart, however. I do not fault them for failing to defeat this legislation. I fault them for not really trying. They opposed the bill, of course. What they failed to do was treat this issue with the seriousness it deserved. Reid explains his course of action by saying that, since the Democrats did not have the votes to sustain a filibuster, they agreed to limit their efforts to eliminating the habeus corpus provisions. Once they lost that vote, a third of the caucus defected on final passage.

I should make a list of the Democrats voting for the measure, since they have earned my special enmity. Dear Senators Carper, Johnson, Landrieu, Lautenberg, Lieberman, Menendez, Nelson (Fla.), Nelson (Neb.), Pryor, Rockefeller, Salazar and Stabenow: I wonder how you shall ever sleep again.

I presume those Democratic Senators who voted for the bill did so for fear of 30-second ads accusing them of being "soft on terror." Perhaps on another issue this would have been a reasonable strategy. But not on this one. There is a difference between a vote on tax cuts and a vote on torture. The niceties of political tactics might be appropriate for a Supreme Court nomination, but not for the death of due process.

Perhaps the Democrats think that the Supreme Court will rescue them by declaring this law unconstitutional. But I ask you, how often as the Supreme Court overruled the Congress on national security measures? Do you really trust your liberty to the courage of Anthony Kennedy? Do you have faith that the Court that decided Bush vs. Gore will protect democracy? Those are very tenuous assumptions.

The Democrats feared being defeated on the Senate floor, and they feared defeat at the polls. It is this fear that prevented them from doing everything in their power to block this legislation. I believe that both fears were unwarranted. And even if they were, it shouldn't matter.

I do not think that this vote will help them politically. In fact I find the Democratic strategy simply absurd. Do you believe that the Republicans will not attack you anyway? Why not take a stand here? If the election must be about an issue, let it be about this one: the Republicans as the party of torture and tyranny, the Democrats as the party of freedom and human dignity; the Republicans as the party of fear, and the Democrats as the party of courage. How difficult would it be to run a campaign on that basis? It takes no sophisticated explanations. It only needs the simple statements that torture is wrong, that no President should be given unlimited powers, and that every man has the right to his day in court. And if the Democrats think that this campaign would not have worked, then we know something about how much faith the Democrats have in the people to choose wisely. I do not think they are right. I do not think that the American people would endorse torture. Perhaps I am wrong, but if so the democracy is dead already.

I am scandalized by the cowardice of the Democratic Party. They have decided that the worst thing in the world is political defeat, and that the most important thing is their political careers. To which I say, we do not elect you to office to "be there." We elect you to fight for justice. There are much worse things than political defeat - there is complicity with evil. If the Democrats had remained united, they could have successfully filibustered and prevented this law from passing. That act alone would have justified their tenure in Senate. They could have looked back with pride and said "If I did nothing else, I did that."

But even if the cloture vote had been successful, the Democrats should have filibustered the legislation anyway. Force the country to focus on this issue. Highlight the differences between the parties. Explain why this bill is so awful, and why any and everything that can be done to stop it must be done. Reject unanimous consent agreements, place holds on that and every other piece of legislation. If you must smash the Senate to defend the Constitution, so be it.

And if the filibuster had failed, the Democrats had been demonized as weak on terror, defeated in the election, and the bill passed next year anyway? I would say the price was worth paying. It would be better to make it clear to all the world that the Democratic Party stands for liberty, whatever the price. The Democrats lost their political majority in the 1960's because they chose to do the right thing and vote for civil rights. It was a price worth paying. They could have done the same yesterday, but they didn't.

I waited for even one Senator to break with their party, to stand alone if they must, and filibuster despite an inevitable defeat. I would have been proud to be a Democrat if even one member of my party had stood in the well condemning this law, holding out until they collapsed and had to be carried out of the chamber. But no Democrat did.

And for that I will never forgive them.