Gore Calls Bush Spying Criminal

Gore called for a special counsel to investigate Bush & Co. doings on evading constitutional safeguards against unauthorized spying and American's privacy, describing Bush's authorization as criminal. In a speech to the The American Constitution Society and The Liberty Coalition today, Gore gave these plain, forceful words:

A president who breaks the law is a threat to the very structure of our government.

A full transcript of Gore's address to the ACS and Liberty Coalition; The Reuters story.

Gore on Bush's Unlimited Executive theory, dubbed in the news a constitutional crisis:

This legal theory, which its proponents call the theory of the unitary executive but which is more accurately described as the unilateral executive, threatens to expand the president's powers until the contours of the constitution that the Framers actually gave us become obliterated beyond all recognition. Under this theory, the President's authority when acting as Commander-in-Chief or when making foreign policy cannot be reviewed by the judiciary or checked by Congress. President Bush has pushed the implications of this idea to its maximum by continually stressing his role as Commander-in-Chief, invoking it has frequently as he can, conflating it with his other roles, domestic and foreign. When added to the idea that we have entered a perpetual state of war, the implications of this theory stretch quite literally as far into the future as we can imagine.

This effort to rework America's carefully balanced constitutional design into a lopsided structure dominated by an all powerful Executive Branch with a subservient Congress and judiciary is-ironically-accompanied by an effort by the same administration to rework America's foreign policy from one that is based primarily on U.S. moral authority into one that is based on a misguided and self-defeating effort to establish dominance in the world.