OBAMA: "Today Begins The Rest(oration) Of Our Lives!"

[BLUSH]

ACLU: Plan for Restoring Civil Liberties in the Next Administration

Barack Obama will become chief executive of a nation that has been greatly weakened - in particular, our freedoms, our values, and our international reputation have been greatly undermined by the policies of the past eight years.

Presidents have enormous power not only to set the legislative agenda, but also to establish policy by executive order, federal regulation, or simply by refocusing the efforts and emphases of the executive agencies. The new president must use all of these tools to restore our freedoms and move the country forward.

Doing so will require determined action in the face of inevitable opposition. It will require conveying to the American people why grants of unchecked power do not actually make us safer, and why Americans must stand firm in protecting the values that at our best we have always represented and defended at home and around the world.

It will not be easy to undo eight years of sustained damage to our fundamental rights. But it can be done.

This paper lists many of the actions that the new president should take in order to decisively signal a restoration of American values and a rejection of the shameful policies of the past eight years.

The first year of any new administration is crucial and sets the stage for what will follow. The new President needs to hit the ground running and to make full use of that first crucial year.

We have grouped needed actions into those that the new president should take on day one, in the 100 days and then the first year. Those actions include executive orders as well as mandates or directives from the president to his cabinet secretaries and agency heads.

http://www.aclu.org/transition/

[BLUSH]

1. Truly Radical

Truly Radical

11.07.08 By Josh Marshall

As you may know the Obama transition team has now set up change.gov as the new transition website. And as TPM Reader SB points out there's already signs of the radicalism McCain and Palin warned the country about.

I've clipped out this section of their organization chart of the US government, which you can find linked on this page.

And as you can see, not only has the president been demoted to a position under the constitution. But the vice-president (as shown by the red arrow) has had his own fourth branch revoked and been reassigned to the executive branch ...





http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/243435.php

[BLUSH]

2. After the Imperial Presidency

After the Imperial Presidency

By JONATHAN MAHLER
Published: November 7, 2008

As it turned out, the power of the president soared to new heights under Bush. Many of the administration’s most aggressive moves came in the realm of national security and the war on terror in particular. The Bush administration claimed the authority to deny captured combatants — U.S. citizens and aliens alike — such basic due-process rights as access to a lawyer. It created a detention facility on Guantánamo Bay that it declared was outside the jurisdiction of the federal courts and built a new legal system — without any input from Congress — to try enemy combatants. And it argued that the president’s commander-in-chief powers gave him the authority to violate America’s laws and treaties, including the Geneva Conventions.

The assertion and expansion of presidential power is arguably the defining feature of the Bush years. Come January, the current administration will pass on to its successor a vast infrastructure for electronic surveillance, secret sites for detention and interrogation and a sheaf of legal opinions empowering the executive to do whatever he feels necessary to protect the country.

When I asked Levin what needs to happen for Congress to take back the rest of the ground that it ceded to the executive branch during the Bush years, he replied predictably, “We need a Democrat in the White House.”

For those concerned about the expansion of presidential power, Barack Obama’s answers to the Boston Globe’s 2007 questionnaire were encouraging. Among other things, he said the president can’t conduct surveillance without warrants or detain United States citizens indefinitely as unlawful enemy combatants. He also said that it’s illegal for the president to ignore international treaties like the Geneva Conventions and that if Congress prohibits a specific interrogation technique by law, the president cannot employ it. “The president is not above the law,” Obama said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/magazine/09power-t.html

[caffeinefwee]

3. Bush quote

[BLUSH]

4. Professor Obama

Marcia DeSanctis
November 10, 2008

But perhaps of even larger importance is that the leader of the world's greatest democracy was a professor of constitutional law and above all, a teacher. The Constitution - as in, the foundation of any functioning democracy - is his area of expertise. As such, he embodies the best possible advertisement for democracy at a time when the world needs it most and our country could benefit from, as Bill Clinton put it, the "power of example" rather than the "example of power."

Even though there are differing standards of classification for what makes a democracy, it always means rule of the people - free and fair elections, elected representatives and freedom of all expression. But it is rule of law as provided by the Constitution which is democracy's sine qua non, and which depending on your interpretation, is either a precondition for, or is strengthened by, democracy. In the U.S., it is the Constitution that provides our basic civil liberties and political rights, allowing us, among many other things, religious freedom, due process, a guarantee that the power of the federal government is not absolute, and the clear delineation of three branches of government.

So when Obama talks about democracy, he knows down to the nitty gritty what he's talking about. As a professor of constitutional law, he knows the Constitution like a farmer knows his soil, perhaps more than any president in American history. This is of course good news and a fortuitous aside domestically, where strict interpretation of the Constitution and of law might give us faith again in ideology-free jurisprudence and legislation. It is also good news to the world, because democracy is no longer on the march, as Ronald Reagan put it over two decades ago, but instead the number of illiberal democracies, as Fareed Zakaria calls them, is increasing.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marcia-desanctis/professor-obama_b_142851.html

[BLUSH]

5. kick

:kick: