the transcript.
http://www.acslaw.org/files/Gore-1-17-06.pdfRestoring the Rule of LawRemarks by Al Gore
As Prepared: January 16, 2006
Congressman Barr and I have disagreed many times over the years, but we have joined
together today with thousands of our fellow citizens—Democrats and Republicans
alike—to express our shared concern that America’s Constitution is in grave danger.
In spite of our differences over ideology and politics, we are in strong agreement that the
American values we hold most dear have been placed at serious risk by the
unprecedented claims of the Administration to a truly breathtaking expansion of
executive power.
As we begin this new year, the Executive Branch of our government has been caught
eavesdropping on huge numbers of American citizens and has brazenly declared that it
has the unilateral right to continue without regard to the established law enacted by
Congress to prevent such abuses.
It is imperative that respect for the rule of law be restored.So, many of us have come here to Constitution Hall to sound an alarm and call upon our
fellow citizens to put aside partisan differences and join with us in demanding that our
Constitution be defended and preserved.
It is appropriate that we make this appeal on the day our nation has set aside to honor the
life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who challenged America to breathe new
life into our oldest values by extending its promise to all our people.
On this particular Martin Luther King Day, it is especially important to recall that for the
last several years of his life, Dr. King was illegally wiretapped—one of hundreds of
thousands of Americans whose private communications were intercepted by the U.S.
government during this period.
The FBI privately called King the “most dangerous and effective negro leader in the
country” and vowed to “take him off his pedestal.” The government even attempted to
destroy his marriage and blackmail him into committing suicide.
This campaign continued until Dr. King’s murder. The discovery that the FBI conducted
a long-running and extensive campaign of secret electronic surveillance designed to
infiltrate the inner workings of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and to
learn the most intimate details of Dr. King’s life, helped to convince Congress to enact
restrictions on wiretapping. .........
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At present, we still have much to learn about the NSA’s domestic surveillance. What we
do know about this pervasive wiretapping virtually compels the conclusion that the
President of the United States has been breaking the law repeatedly and persistently.
A president who breaks the law is a threat to the very structure of our government. Our
Founding Fathers were adamant that they had established a government of laws and not
men. Indeed, they recognized that the structure of government they had enshrined in our
Constitution – our system of checks and balances – was designed with a central purpose
of ensuring that it would govern through the rule of law. As John Adams said: “The
executive shall never exercise the legislative and judicial powers, or either of them, to the
end that it may be a government of laws and not of men.”
An executive who arrogates to himself the power to ignore the legitimate legislative
directives of the Congress or to act free of the check of the judiciary becomes the central
threat that the Founders sought to nullify in the Constitution – an all-powerful executive
too reminiscent of the King from whom they had broken free. In the words of James
Madison, “the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the
same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or
elective,
may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”