commissions that Bush had created without congressional authorization were, in fact, unconstitutional. The case,
The separation of powers that the Founders wrote into our Constitution as the main bulwark against dictatorship increasingly appears to be a dead letter, with the Congress no longer capable of asserting itself against presidential attempts to monopolize power. Corrupt and indifferent, the Congress, which the Founders believed would be the leading branch of government, is simply not up to the task of confronting a modern Julius Caesar. As former representative Bob Barr, a conservative from Georgia, concludes, “The American people are going to have to say, ‘Enough of this business of justifying everything as necessary for the war on terror.’ Either the Constitution and the laws of this country mean something or they don’t. It is truly frightening what is going on in this country.”69
If the legislative branch of our government is broken—and it is hard to imagine how it could repair itself, given the massive interests that feed off it—the judicial branch is hardly less limited today in terms of its ability to maintain the balance. Even the Supreme Court’s most extraordinary power, its ability to nullify a law as unconstitutional, rests on precedent rather than constitutional stipulation, and lower courts, increasingly packed with right-wing judges, have little taste for going against the prevailing political winds. For example, on February 16, 2006, U.S. District Court judge David Trager dismissed a suit for damages by a thirty-five-year-old Canadian citizen, Maher Arar, who in 2002 was seized by U.S. government agents at Kennedy Airport, New York, en route to Ottawa. Arar was shackled, hustled aboard a CIA airplane, and delivered to Syria, where he was tortured for ten months before being released. No charges were ever filed against him, and even his torturers declared that they had been unable to discover any evidence that might link him to a terror network. The case for compensation, not to mention an apology, seemed open and shut.
In dismissing Arar’s suit, Judge Trager wrote that foreign policy and national security issues raised by the U.S. government were “compelling” and that such matters were the purview of the executive branch and Congress, not the courts. He acknowledged that in sending Arar to Syria, the U.S. government knew he would be tortured—the State Department had already publicly detailed the Syrians’ capabilities and record as torturers.
The evidence strongly suggests that the legislative and judicial branches, having become so servile in the presence of the imperial presidency, have largely lost the ability to respond in a principled and independent manner. Could the people themselves restore constitutional government? A grassroots movement to abolish the CIA, break the hold of the military-industrial complex, and establish public financing of elections may be theoretically conceivable but is unlikely given the conglomerate control of the mass media and the difficulties of mobilizing our large and diffuse population.
It is also possible that, at some future moment, the U.S. military could actually take over the government and declare a dictatorship (though they undoubtedly would find a gentler, more user-friendly name for it). That is how the Roman Republic ended. But I think it unlikely that the American military will go that route. In recent years, the officer corps has become more “professional,” as well as more political and more Republican in its sympathies, while the all-volunteer army has become an ever more separate institution in our society, its profile less and less like that of the general populace. Nonetheless, for the military voluntarily to move toward direct rule, its leaders would have to ignore their ties to civilian society, where the symbolic importance of constitutional legitimacy remains potent.
Rebellious officers might well worry about how the American people would react to such a move. Moreover, prosecutions of low-level military torturers from Abu Ghraib prison have demonstrated to enlisted ranks that obedience to illegal orders can result in their being punished, whereas officers go free. No one knows whether ordinary soldiers would obey clearly illegal orders to oust the elected government or whether the officer corps has sufficient confidence to issue such orders. For the time being at least, the highest medal for bravery and sacrifice in the American military is still the Congressional Medal of Honor, not the Victoria Cross, the Iron Cross, or the Order of Lenin. In addition, the present system already offers the military high command so much—in funds, prestige, and future employment via the military-industrial revolving door—that a perilous transition to anything like direct military rule would make little sense under reasonably normal conditions.
The likelihood is that the United States will maintain a facade of constitutional government and drift along until financial bankruptcy overtakes it. Of course, bankruptcy will not mean the literal end of the United States any more than it did for Germany in 1923, China in 1948, or Argentina in 2001-2. It might, in fact, open the way for an unexpected restoration of the American system, or for military rule, or simply for some new development we cannot yet imagine. Certainly, such a bankruptcy would mean a drastic lowering of our standard of living, a loss of control over international affairs, a process of adjusting to the rise of other powers, including China and India, and a further discrediting of the notion that the United States is somehow exceptional compared to other nations. We will have to learn what it means to be a far poorer nation and the attitudes and manners that go with it. As Anatol Lieven, author of
On February 6, 2006, the Bush administration submitted to Congress a $439 billion defense appropriation budget for fiscal 2007. At the same time, the deficit in the United States’ current account—the imbalance in the trading of goods and services as well as the shortfall in all other cross-border payments from interest income and rents to dividends and profits on direct investments—underwent its fastest-ever quarterly deterioration.72 In the fourth quarter of 2005, the deficit hit a staggering $225 billion, up from $185.4 billion in the previous quarter. For all of 2005, the current account deficit was $805 billion, 6.4 percent of national income. In 2005, the U.S. trade deficit, the largest component of the current account deficit, soared to an all-time high of $725.8 billion, the fourth consecutive year that America’s trade debts set records. The trade deficit with China alone rose to $201.6 billion, the highest imbalance ever recorded with any country. Meanwhile, since mid- 2000, the country has lost nearly three million manufacturing jobs.73
To try to cope with these imbalances, on March 16, 2006, Congress raised the national debt limit from $8.2 trillion to $8.96 trillion. This was the fourth time since George W. Bush took office that it had to be raised. The national debt is the total amount owed by the government and should not be confused with the federal budget deficit, the annual amount by which federal spending exceeds revenue. Had Congress not raised the debt limit, the U.S. government would not have been able to borrow more money and would have had to default on its massive debts.
Among the creditors that finance this unprecedented sum, two of the largest are the central banks of China ($853.7 billion in reserves of dollars and other foreign currencies) and Japan ($831.58 billion), both of which are the managers of the huge trade surpluses these countries enjoy with the United States.74 This helps explain why our debt burden has not yet triggered what standard economic theory would dictate: a steep decline in the value of the U.S. dollar followed by a severe contraction of the American economy because we could no longer afford the foreign goods we like so much. However, both the Chinese and Japanese governments continue to be willing to be paid in dollars in order to sustain American demand for their exports. For the sake of domestic
