The Reactionary Utopian
                    December 20, 2005


NONE DARE CALL IT HYPOTHETICAL
by Joe Sobran

     In Washington, D.C., a local talk-radio host poses a 
provocative question: What if international terrorists 
were plotting a Super 9/11 that would kill not just 3,000 
Americans -- mere child's play for these nuts -- but 
might wipe 30,000, 300,000, or even "a city of 3,000,000 
off the face of the planet"? Would the president then be 
justified in a few technically illegal wiretaps to detect 
them in time? The question practically answers itself.

     Come to think of it, what if a bunch of raghead 
Islamofascist suicide bombers got hold of a bomb that 
would destroy the entire world, blasting the planet into 
four or five huge chunks? And suppose the details of 
their plot were known only to a few long-haired, 
reefer-crazed, unpatriotic hippies who hated our way of 
life and weren't talking. Wouldn't the president, in that 
case, be duty-bound to use interrogation techniques 
frowned on by the ACLU?

     As Abraham Lincoln said, it may be necessary to 
sacrifice one provision of the Constitution in order to 
preserve the whole of it. The problem of saving the Union 
becomes even more urgent when you face the chance that 
various sections of the Union may wind up in different 
parts of the solar system. (But there's always a silver 
lining: The media would have to stop whining about global 
warming.)

     In the unhappy event that our Mother Earth were 
violently sundered because President Bush didn't have 
time to get court authorization to rough up a few hippies 
-- for want of a nail, a horseshoe was lost, et cetera -- 
a few of the survivors, stranded on the wrong chunk, 
would still have to live under a Republican 
administration, listening to talk radio. And no doubt the 
president would continue to insist that it was still 
quite feasible to bring democracy to the Muslim world, 
even if this now required an interplanetary mission. He 
might also point out, with some justification, that 
withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq, as the cut-and-run 
Democrats want to do, had just become an even greater 
logistical difficulty than before.

     Or, to think outside the box for a moment, consider 
an even more chilling possibility: What if we had an 
arrogant moron in the White House who neither understood 
nor cared what the laws and the Constitution said, with 
his party controlling both houses of Congress? I admit 
this is a far-fetched example, but these are not normal 
times. Just try to imagine it. We can't be too careful.

     Such are the stakes in the current debate over 
whether President Bush has acted ultra vires -- beyond 
his legal powers, even in violation of the Constitution 
he swore to uphold -- in ordering surveillance for what 
is called national security. His defenders appeal to the 
president's "implied powers," the right-wing answer to 
liberalism's "penumbras formed by emanations" as a device 
for infinitely elastic interpretations of plain words, 
words their authors mistakenly assumed anyone could 
understand, even an ordinary Yale graduate.

     When the U.S. Constitution was written, Yale and 
Harvard were still little Christian colleges, not yet big 
universities; Benjamin Franklin was puttering with 
electricity, which nobody foresaw would transform home 
life, communication, and everything else; air travel was 
hardly even a dream; modern weapons of mass murder 
weren't even imagined; and the first version of KING KONG 
hadn't yet been filmed.

     How could this quaint document have relevance to our 
world today? A fair question. Without treating it as Holy 
Writ, we can recognize that it embodied a sound 
principle: the division of power. Like an even older and 
quainter document, the Magna Carta, its distant ancestor, 
it recognized the danger of concentrating arbitrary power 
in the hands of too few men, especially one man. The 
narrow specifics differ, which is why each generation's 
passions sound quaint to the next; but the principle is 
always the same.

     In a word, the Constitution is anti-monarchical. 
This is why it provides for things like elections, which 
we still have, and impeachments, which, though essential 
protections, are all too rare. Elections without the real 
threat of impeachment invite the abuse of power.

     Monarchism -- which might be called political 
idolatry or hero-worship -- is a perennial temptation, 
even under the forms of a republic, as Bush and his 
supporters illustrate, with their bizarre claims, 
demands, and excuses for concentrated power. And the 
temptation is most acute in time of war. This isn't just 
an occasional case of "history repeating itself"; it's 
the never-ending story of all politics.

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