On censure

Radio host Cenk Uygur has a post well worth reading at today's HuffPo, asking, essentially, "If not censure, what?!" Snippets:

Maybe I'm missing something. I would love to get filled on what maneuver Senator Feingold should have done when the Republican Guard circled the wagons and refused to investigate a president who claimed to be above the law. Is there a magic non-political wand you can wave to make that happen?

By the way, one of my favorite arguments in politics is when one side accuses the other side of playing politics. You don't say? They don't call them politicians for nothin'. Of course, every maneuver can be described as political somehow. Is there anything more brazenly political than the way President Bush has used 9/11 as a bludgeoning stick against his political opponents?

[...]

The law that the so-called moderate Republican Senators on the Intelligence Committee are proposing is a travesty. It would make the president's illegal actions legal in retrospect, water down the FISA law even more and ultimately make getting a warrant optional. Other than being an outrageous political stunt to cover for the president, it is also thoroughly unconstitutional. You can't just write a law saying the president doesn't have to follow the Fourth Amendment anymore.

[...]

Standing up to the president now would certainly go a long way in making up for how Specter stared his career. He is the man who came up with the single bullet theory for the Warren Commission. Now he is the single bullet left in democracy's arsenal.

If he doesn't pull the trigger and conduct a real hearing into the president's actions, then no one can make the argument that Senator Feingold's censure resolution is political. There would be no alternative way of trying to get the president to stop breaking the law.

As I've said repeatedly in this column, this is an issue that goes beyond Blue and Red, Left and Right, D and R. It speaks to our definition of the democracy we imagine "America" to be. Is our President still an elected servant of the people, the defender of the Constitution, accountable for wrongdoing no differently than any other American citizen?

Or is the office of President, if surrounded by enough loyalists in the Legislative and Judiciary, immune to the constraint of law? Is George Bush, and, more importantly, every President yet to come, a true monarch, an imperial ruler intolerant of dissent, directed by God Herself, free to ignore those laws he personally finds "cumbersome" with absolute impunity, empowered to write new legislation to excuse his self-serving or illegal agenda after the fact?

Because that's what it comes down to, kids. It's a simple question that has nothing to do with your Party of choice, but everything to do with the very heart and soul of our uniquely American democracy - the rights and power and shared responsibilities of "We the People." It's about sending a reminder to the temporary occupant of the White House that he still works for us, and that no President, whether lying under oath about a marital infidelity or warrantless eavesdropping on American citizens, is above the law.

This is an issue of simple, even if largely symbolic, accountability - which is why no one who calls him- or herself a "patriot" has a viable reason to oppose it. If Republicans and Democrats alike don't rein-in this wild stallion from Crawford, then they are in effect acquiescing to the idea that our nation is now ruled by a king. Sorry, but that's not the America I signed on for.

230 years ago, a handful of intellectual, multi-denominational, Liberal thinkers from the East Coast tossed a king out of this dump on his ear. If it comes to that, don't think that it can't - or won't - happen again.

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(Think I'm kidding about an impending monarchy? If you missed it Sunday, read this post by georgia10 at DailyKOS.)