SIVACRACY.NET

I wrote this on Altercation today:

I have to confess. I don't care about Deep Throat. When the news broke, I yawned. I got annoyed when the right-wing media brought out a line of criminals to make some sort of case that Nixon was treated unfairly or that those who pushed on Watergate were somehow betraying this country. In all the talk about intrigue and unnamed sources, I never heard anyone talk about the real lesson of Watergate: accountability.

Deep Throat did not bring down a president. The Washington Post did not bring down a president. The Constitution and the core beliefs of this country brought down a corrupt president.

Watergate was about the Constitution working -- about the system working. It was not about one FBI agent sneaking around a parking garage. It was about enough people -- Republicans and Democrats, journalists and lawyers, citizens and statesmen -- choosing the country over the president, the law over the man.

No Democrat benefited more from Nixon's resignation than James Madison himself. His system of checks and balances, of independent judgment and process prevailed against all odds.

Every time I heard a Chuck Colson or a G. Gordon Liddy consulted last week as some sort of expert on political courage or righteousness, I yearned for the strong, resonant, moral voice of Barbara Jordan.

Jordan, who passed away in 1996, was the first black woman elected to the Texas Senate and the first black woman elected as a U.S. Representative from Texas. As a member of the House Judiciary Committee she gave the most memorable and patriotic address the Capitol had heard since Lincoln spoke.

I remember sitting on a couch with my mother as we watched Jordan address the committee. My mother broke into tears during the talk. I was eight years old. I knew Nixon was a bad man and was happy he was leaving. But I had little sense of the larger, historical issues at work. My mother's tears convinced me there was something much deeper at stake.

Here is some of what Barbara Jordan said that day:

Earlier today we heard the beginning of the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States, We, the people. It is a very eloquent beginning. But when that document was completed, on the seventeenth of September in 1787, I was not included in that We, the people. I felt somehow for many years that George Washington and Alexander Hamilton just left me out by mistake. But through the process of amendment, interpretation, and court decision I have finally been included in We, the people.

Today I am an inquisitor. I believe hyperbole would not be fictional and would not overstate the solemness that I feel right now. My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total. I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution.

Who can so properly be the inquisitors for the nation as the representatives of the nation themselves?" (Federalist, no. 65) The subject of its jurisdiction are those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men." That is what we are talking about. In other words, the juresdiction comes from the abuse of violation of some public trust. It is wrong, I suggest, it is a misreading of the Constitution for any member here to assert that for a member to vote for an article of impeachment means that that member must be convinced that the president should be removed from office. The Constitution doesn't say that. The powers relating to impeachment are an essential check in the hands of this body, the legislature, against and upon the encroachment of the executive. In establishing the division between the two branches of the legislature, the House and the Senate, assigning to the one the right to accuse and to the other the right to judge, the framers of this Constitution were very astute. They did not make the accusers and the judges the same person. ...

... If the impeachment provision in the Constitution of the United States will not reach the offenses charged here, then perhaps that eighteenth century Constitution should be abandoned to a twentieth-century paper shredder. Has the president committed offenses and planned and directed and acquiesced in a course of conduct which the Constitution will not tolerate? That is the question. We know that. We know the question. We should now forthwith proceed to answer the question. It is reason, and not passion, which must guide our deliberations, guide our debate, and guide our decision."

In subsequent years I have reflected on why my mother would cry during such an event. I like to think she knew that the moment that Barbara Jordan made the issue clear to Americans, we were saved. We could push on. We could realize our dream of justice under the law. Perhaps she was thinking about all her family gave up for this country. Her father served in the Navy in three wars. Three of her brothers-in-law served in the Vietnam era. She was a Navy brat, raised on bases around the Pacific, subsisting on cans of Spam and tuna casserole. Perhaps she was thinking about all this country gave to her family. She had married an immigrant, a man severed from his own family by half the world. She was raising children who would have to negotiate these stories and lessons, who would grow up in a world defined by the way power worked in Washington, D.C. Perhaps everything that really mattered to her rested on Barbara Jordan's words that day.

The Democratic Party did not win in 1974. The country did.

Republicans concurred back then. They have forgotten since.

Two years after she helped the Constitution bring down a corrupt president, Barbara Jordan made me cry. I cried along side my mother on that same couch as Jordan adressed the Democratic National Convention in New York City. In this speech she answered the questions that so many readers of this site have been trying to answer for many weeks: What do we believe? What are we for? Barbara Jordan, who had lived it, told us:

We believe that the people are the source of all governmental power; that the authority of the people is to be extended, not restricted. This can be accomplished only by providing each citizen with every opportunity to participate in the management of the government. They must have that.

We believe that the government which represents the authority of all the people, not just one interest group, but all the people, has an obligation to actively underscore, actively seek to remove those obstacles which would block individual achievement...obstacles emanating from race, sex, economic condition. The government must seek to remove them.

We are a party of innovation. We do not reject our traditions, but we are willing to adapt to changing circumstances, when change we must. We are willing to suffer the discomfort of change in order to achieve a better future.

We have a positive vision of the future founded on the belief that the gap between the promise and reality of America can one day be finally closed. We believe that.

Do we need a clearer set of principles? I don't think so.

A Reason to Cry

I can only remember one other political event bringing tears to my eyes. During the Tiananmen Square demonstrations in June 1989, I cried whenever I saw people my age (I was in my early 20s) raising symbols of liberty and democracy in the face of tyrants. When I saw that young man stand in front of a tank, I broke down. That's courage. That's what it's all about. That's when I became a fully political person.

That's when I realized how complacent and comfortable we Americans had become. Who among us would stand up in front of a tank in a public square? The system had worked so well in my youth that we were now in danger of letting our pettiness and provincialism overrun us. I started to think about all the ways the rest of the world could come at us to shake us out of our complacency. And I started to think how easy it would be to launch an tyrannical movement from within this country, encased in the language of liberty, yet intolerant, belligerent, and Millenarian.

In these days of complacency, who will take a stand? Who will speak for the Constitution? Who will call tyranny tyranny, before it rises again?