"No person with active cerebral faculties," writes Fein, "can be optimistic about the survival of a Republican form of government and checks and balances in the United States." When Fein testified before the House Judiciary Committee this past July to urge impeachment, he was shocked to learn that "all pejorative references to President Bush or Vice-President Cheney insinuating deceit or impeachable high crimes and misdemeanors were censored under a House rule derived from the British Parliament's prohibition on voicing 'irreverence' toward the king."
Footprints in the sand
Fein, despite all of his political differences, transfixed the largely liberal ACLUM audience with his moral and constitutional fervor. (ACLUM Executive Director Carol Rose has already invited Fein for a return engagement, to address an even larger audience.) His is a message yearning to be heard and heeded in an age when, as Fein notes at the end of his book, "the overwhelming majority of Americans are vastly more thrilled by sporting events and creature comforts than they are by the moral challenges and burdens of self-government."
Given his pessimism, one wonders why Fein maintains such a back-breaking schedule of exposing and opposing unconstitutional usurpations of power and betrayal of duty? "Anything else would be dishonorable," writes Fein. And, besides, by speaking out "you might leave footprints in the sands of time to inspire someone yet to be born to champion freedom in more propitious circumstances."
Let us hope those circumstances are, as of today, just some two months away. But those with faith that the Obama administration will diverge sharply from the war on liberty waged by George W. Bush should recall Reagan's approach to then–Soviet Prime Minister Mikhail Gorbachev's promises of glasnost: "Trust, but verify."
Harvey Silverglate is a Cambridge-based criminal-defense and civil-liberties lawyer, and a member of the Board of Directors of the ACLU of Massachusetts. His next book, Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent, is forthcoming next year from Encounter Books. Kyle Smeallie assisted in the preparation of this piece.
