During presidential campaign of 1800, a Richmond newspaper editor named James Thomas Callender was arrested under the statutes of the Sedition Act of 1798 for publishing editorials critical of President John Adams.
Adams used the Sedition Act as a means to imprison congressmen, newspaper publishers and even the Newark, NJ town drunk who joked to a bartender that President Adams ought to be shot in the ass with a cannon. True story. Luther Baldwin, the drunk who threatened the presidential ass, was held in prison indefinitely until he could pay the fine while James Callender was sentenced to nine months in jail and fined $200.
The goal of the law was clear: to maintain Federalist Party control. Of course the publicly stated goal of the Sedition Act and its sister-law, the Alien Act, was to prevent Federalists from being weakened in a time when we were smoking Frenchmen out of their holes. For this reason, these laws carried considerable public support. Yet for the record, James Callender, Luther Baldwin, and Congressman Matthew Lyon (who was also imprisoned) were clearly not French. And there's no records indicating Luther was an actual Baldwin Brother who, by the way, were equally despised by conservatives even then.
The presidential candidate for whom Callender became a martyr was Vice President Thomas Jefferson. Obviously Jefferson could not personally criticize Adams due to the Sedition Act, so Callender served as a Sedition Act lightning rod for his fellow Virginian. It was the only way Jefferson could criticize the president and get away with it without being incarcerated as an enemy of the state.
Shortly after the election in which Jefferson narrowly defeated Adams, the Sedition Act expired without ever being challenged in the Supreme Court. It failed to give the Federalists the lasting power they craved and became an historical albatross for Adams. Nevertheless, it made a repeat performance more than 100 years later at the behest of President Wilson in 1918. This time, however, legislators successfully repealed the law.
So that brings us to the present course of events.
Even though the Democrats have triumphantly regained control of Congress, the Military Commissions Act and the USA Patriot Act remain on the books.
On the same day he killed habeas corpus with the MCA, the president signed the John Warner Defense Authorization Act which strips control of the National Guard from state governors and allows President Bush and Secretary of Defense-Designate Bob Gates to move the Guard anywhere in the country. You know... to protect us from ourselves... with martial law. As per usual, the congressional Republicans snuck this into an appropriations bill that included a pay raise for the troops, forcing the hand of anyone who would oppose it.
Elsewhere, a right-wing terrorist has been arrested after allegedly mailing fake anthrax to various media personalities and Democratic politicians. And Fox News Channel appears to be reviving its self-satirical argument equating the Democrats with the terrorists via both internal memoranda and sad little men disguised as political contributors.
So the president has both the legal tools and the other "tools": Fox News anchors, executives, producers and contributors; right-wing radio hosts; and right-wing terrorists. Tools. All of these tools are soldiering on, working in conjunction to form one big tool. The endgame of this coitus of tools could rapidly lead us to a situation, not unlike the dark days of 1800 and 1918, in which President Bush can use his flight suit sized meta-tool to stop an increasingly vocal and powerful opposition. When those who oppose the president or those who have dark skin or legal immigration status can effectively be painted as a threat to national security, our democracy ceases to be merely endangered but rather is rendered, in effect, dead. (The corporate murder of democracy is an issue for another day.)
This is the president who thinks holding elections in a time of war isn't a sure thing which is only slightly more loopy than, I don't know, Bill O'Reilly and John Gibson believing that Christmas isn't a sure thing.
When elections are no longer a given in the mind of the president, it stands to reason that the possibility of somehow canceling future elections might've crossed his mind. And why wouldn't it? He has the tools. He has the National Guard positioned in every state under his control. He can legally disappear and torture anyone he chooses. He can use legal (yet unconstitutional) means to gather information about political opponents to smear and shame them. The president has unprecedented power to do almost anything he wants and the unwavering support of both a major cable news network and, on the fringe, would-be domestic terrorists.
So really. Who the crap needs another Sedition Act? The president is toting a Crawford holster filled with far better tools as he plummets head first into two years of harried political conflict -- the fluttering and charred remains of the Constitution forming a cloud of dust in his wake.
Certainly congressional Democrats like Senators Leahy and Feingold have earned the majority leverage to push through legislation rolling back all or most of the unconstitutional provisions of these laws -- laws which serve only to pacify the infantile cowardice of those who would sacrifice liberty for a false sense of security. But these roll backs would still require the signature of the president, and unless his stuffed package became irreversibly retracted into his body cavity last Tuesday, this is doubtful.
Another champion of democracy who lines up with the discontent of Leahy and Feingold is Senator-Elect Jon Tester who made a pledge in September to work towards the absolute repeal of the USA Patriot Act -- rather than simply amending its individual pieces. (Dag. These new "conservative" Democrats. Stop them before they invade Poland! Don't forget Poland!)
The Democrats have a very real opportunity to fix this madness -- not just in Iraq -- but right here at home as our Constitution, our liberties and our democracy are bogged down in a similar quagmire spawned by the same consummation of tools who brought us Iraq. So it stands to reason that if they can abuse our troops and what remains of our national reputation for the sake of political points and corporate profit, it's no stretch that they're equally as prone to abusing the Constitution and the posterity of those who framed it. And they've done just that, damn your eyes.
For me, it's on this issue that I will judge our new Congress. Iraq, energy, global warming, ethics and election reform, and the economy (the debt and middle class tax cuts) are, in tandem, gathered in a close second place. But none of these issues can be addressed until the democratic balance of power is wrested from the hands of the totalitarian tools in the White House and beyond.