King George seems to believe that he and only he knows what is best for our country. There appears to be a number of loyalists in our population that are quite comfortable letting King George do as he pleases, even if it means trading hard won freedoms for a false sense of security.
There are those of us who see the expansion of unrestrained executive power as a threat to our country.
This could have easily be written in 1776. Yet the words define the crisis that our country faces today. We have a president who believes that he is above the law.
As is often the case in times of crisis, fear has been used to manipulate not only the voters but also the very lawmakers whose historic role has been to provide a crucial check to the power of the president. They have been unwilling to step up to that role until recently.
As we struggle to create democratic foundations on the other side of the world, terrorists must take great pleasure in seeing us dismantle our own democratic protections out of fear of another terrorist attack.
Terrorists cannot destroy our democracy, only we can. We face a great danger in allowing our president to be above the law. Spying on Americans with no judicial controls is the first step on a very slippery slope.
It doesn't take a lot of to see what can happen. If the executive branch can spy on Americans, they can also spy on legitimate opposition parties.
We're already in the situation where the Republican party has gerrymandered election districts in Texas to create a Congressional majority.
I've been listening to David McCullough's "1776." It's a narrative of the difficulties faced by the Continental Army in fighting the Revolutionary War. It was only by the smallest margin that we won our freedoms and have been able to keep them intact these two hundred plus years.
It occurs to me that those who fought in the Revolutionary War really understood the dangers of allowing their freedoms to be trampled on by an unrestrained executive. I'm not certain that we as a country have awakened to the dangers of allowing an executive branch to do as it wants in collusion with a legislature unwilling to stand up for our rights.
Perhaps the recent signs of backbone regarding the anti-torture resolutions and the so-called "Patriot Act" might be a sign that the pendulum will swing back as the our legislators realize that if they keep acting like a rubber stamp for the president, they may wake up one day and not have any powers left.
We don't have a finely oiled machine of government. What we do have is a system that often gets out of balance, but somehow manages to get back to center over time. The genius of those giants of 1776 is that they built a framework which has managed to survive many challenges over the centuries.
Our job is to not let an over enthusiastic executive destroy that delicate balance. I hope we don't let down those real patriots of 1776 who sacrificed everything for those freedoms that we so often take for granted. It would be a travesty for those freedoms to whittled away because we allowed our own government to use fear to manipulate us.
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