Delegitimizing the Federal Government

I've posted before about how horrible I think the Bush administration has been for democracy in this country, but I read happened today that really drove that point home for me. Slashdot notes that the House has passed a bill, quote, "outlawing illegal domestic wiretapping by the government." This would have been nonsense ten years ago. It doesn't make any sense to outlaw something that's already illegal; you can't illegalize the illegal, because guess what, it's already illegal. And yet nowadays this is passed off as something normal, as if it were normal for the House to believe it needs to try to outlaw something that's unconstitutional (warrants are required by the Constitution for wiretapping).

When I read this story my reaction was that even if the Senate passed it, even if the Supreme Court ruled found warrantless wiretapping unconstitutional, Bush would continue to wiretap without warrants. That reaction isn't just one of distrust in the people who run the executive branch, it's one of distrust in the people who run Congress and the justices who sit on the Supreme Court; I don't think any of them can properly act as an effective weight to balance the power of the people who run the executive branch. And while I think that's partially thanks to Congressional Republicans and less-than-savory judicial appointees, I think more importantly that it's the result of a failure in the Constitution to provide adequate safeguards against a president who seems to care nothing for the Constitution, the body of tradition grown up around it, and the legitimacy of the other branches of government. My reaction shows a distrust in the regime, in the rules, regulations, and public offices that form the underlying lattice of our political system. This administration has made me wonder whether our system is robust enough to constrain an executive that seems bent on completely dominating the other branches.

And there's the worst part of this: Bush is chipping away at my belief in the legitimacy of the federal government, that is, my belief that I should do what the government asks merely because that's the right thing to do. By becoming president despite losing the popular vote and by shady doings in Florida and the Supreme Court; by lying to me about the cause for war in Iraq; by disregarding the Constitution in his strikes at habeas corpus, his use of torture, warrantless wiretapping, and signing statements, and his theory of the unitary executive; by continuing to disregard the will of the people on things like the war and Attorney General Gonzales; and by creating a situation in which reporting that the House feels it needs to outlaw the unconstitutional, that legitimacy is slowly dying. In our system we rely very heavily on legitimacy, using the threat of coercion only rarely and using actual coercive force only on those very few who break the rules. But if legitimacy is gone, then the only way for the government to control the populace is through coercion, and a once-legitimate democracy takes on shades of a police state. And when a government loses legitimacy, it doesn't just lose it for itself, it loses it for the regime by which it has temporary control of the country and, by extension, for the future governments that come after it.

Merely political things like keeping an unpopular war going or considering whether to allow the state to bargain with pharmaceutical companies in drug pricing, those are things that can be rectified easily just by electing a new Congress and president. Trying to overcome a loss of legitimacy in the eyes of the public, that takes a whole lot more.