![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/10\/badlevine.jpeg\" "\\"badlevine\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\nInstead, it has \u201cauthorized\u201d the use of force. \u00a0Lately, these authorizations have been so open-ended that they give the executive branch carte blanche to do almost anything it wants. Even more than George Bush, Obama has taken full advantage.<\/p>\n
For the diminution of Congressional power, we mainly have a succession of imperial presidents to thank. But these presidents couldn\u2019t have gotten away with it without the active cooperation of Congress itself.<\/p>\n
The judiciary\u2019s power to overrule Congress and the White House \u2014 to operate as a super-legislature or executive \u2013 is not itself a Constitutional provision, but the practice is so deeply entrenched that it is almost never contested.<\/p>\n
The Supreme Court today, the Roberts Court has been especially flagrant in its usurpation of legislative powers.<\/p>\n
But then, in ways that have only recently become apparent, even its own powers have been impinged upon \u2014 thanks largely to its own connivance.<\/p>\n
We know this because The New York Times <\/i>has been shamed into doing its job \u2014 ever so slightly. Try as they might, they could not just continue only serving as an unofficial propaganda arm of the American government while the The Guardian<\/i> actually practiced journalism by reporting on whistle-blower Edward Snowden\u2019s revelations of National Security Agency spying.<\/p>\n
And so, the Times<\/i> reported last Sunday that, operating in secret, the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Court, the so-called FISA court, comprised of eleven members \u2013 chosen by (who else?) Chief Justice John Roberts \u2013 has without public scrutiny or meaningful oversight \u201cquietly become almost a parallel Supreme Court, serving as the ultimate arbiter on surveillance issues and delivering opinions that will most likely shape intelligence practices for years to come.\u201d<\/p>\n
In other words, even the Supremes are no longer supreme.<\/p>\n
They are in theory, of course; just as, in theory, only Congress can declare war. The Constitution has not been \u201csuspended,\u201d as it was in Egypt. It is just ignored with impunity whenever that suits the government\u2019s purpose.<\/p>\n
And, to make matters worse, it is not even the government that is calling the shots, so much as what is supposedly just part of its executive branch \u2014 the part that is not subject to popular control even in theory; the part that has metastasized into a security-military complex.<\/p>\n
So long as this is the case, the fact that our Constitution has not been suspended like Egypt\u2019s was is a distinction without a difference.<\/p>\n
However it is also a reason for hope \u2014 a slender reed, but better than nothing at all.<\/p>\n
Because ours is still officially a Constitutional republic, it is not yet impossible, within the existing political framework, to restore the kind of Constitutional government our founders envisioned.<\/p>\n
Indeed, had Americans elected a President in 2008 who was anything like the President many of them thought they had voted for, he might have been able to turn things around. At least he had enough political capital in the first few months of his Administration \u2014 before he squandered it utterly.<\/p>\n
And were Congress not full of pusillanimous, bought and paid for Democrats and Republicans who care not a wit about the public good, it could still assert the authority that is rightfully its own.<\/p>\n
But, whatever was once the case, the Democratic Party now is probably beyond redemption. It has been that way ever since Bill Clinton had his way with it two decades ago.<\/p>\n
Many liberals thought otherwise in 2008; but after five years of Barack Obama and Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, it is hard to see how even they can sustain the illusion.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Congressional Republicans live in mortal fear of constituents even more benighted than themselves. Thanks to gerrymandering, they mostly represent \u201csafe\u201d districts. Therefore they don\u2019t need to appeal to Democrats or \u201ccentrists\u201d or to sane people at all; they need only please the GOP-Tea Party lunatic fringe.<\/p>\n
Don\u2019t count on them, therefore, to restore Constitutional government. Because, as they see it, it never hurts to oppose Obama, they may sometimes do the right thing. But they will never do it for the right reasons. They are a risible and untrustworthy lot.<\/p>\n
Had our decrepit Congress not established the FISA court and then turned its administration over to a crusading right-wing Chief Justice, we might now have a judicial system that is still somewhat respectful of basic rights and liberties. Instead we have an unaccountable kangaroo court surreptitiously quashing them at every opportunity.<\/p>\n
Politicians in capitalist societies are always constrained by the exigencies of capitalist development, though the degree of constraint varies, depending on circumstances. As a general rule, though, they cannot do anything much if they do not, so to speak, get with the program.<\/p>\n
This is why in states in capitalist societies counter-systemic policies are non-starters. They cannot be sustained or, in most circumstances, even attempted.<\/p>\n
In America today, however, there are more than just the usual constraints at work.<\/p>\n
From the seventies on, our government has pursued policies that have transformed capitalism in the United States and other capitalist centers. As a result, the financial sector has become the driving force of capital accumulation \u2014 to a degree that is unprecedented in the history of capitalism.<\/p>\n
In this brave new world of finance capital, financial markets reign supreme. And increasing economic inequality has wiped out many of the progressive achievements of the preceding century.<\/p>\n
Our capitalists, the one percent of the one percent, have become as obscenely rich as capitalists have ever been, and they always get their way. It is not just that they constrain political actors; in America today, they own them.<\/p>\n
And they like the way things are. No Constitutional republic for them; and certainly no democracy where the popular masses, the demos, rule; from their point of view, \u201cwe, the people\u201d are the enemy.<\/p>\n
We are not living in a full-fledged police state; far from it. But our political class is hard at work putting the infrastructure for one in place.<\/p>\n
It is because he made that reality so painfully apparent that Edward Snowden has become Public Enemy Number One, and a hero to people throughout the entire world.<\/p>\n
He is the one the coup leaders want to suppress; and the one the rest of us want and need to hear.<\/p>\n
We need to hear, beyond any shadow of a doubt, just how our Constitutional form of government has been overthrown, and how our political leaders, in service to the one percent of the percent, have brought this about.<\/p>\n
* * *<\/p>\n
In Latin America, they tell a joke: why has the United States never suffered a coup? Because it has no American embassy.<\/p>\n
True enough for those who fetishize the details of paradigmatic instances of bona fide coups d\u2019\u00c3\u00a9tat.<\/p>\n
But the punch line is false in the larger sense. To pull of a coup here, our capitalists didn\u2019t need an embassy or a CIA or any of those special ops (Murder Incorporated) types our Commander-in-Chief loves to deploy.<\/p>\n
They may need them in the future; and they are preparing the groundwork in case they do. But to get to where we now are, none of that was necessary.<\/p>\n
In an overripe capitalist economy like ours, base and servile politicians in league with \u201cimpersonal\u201d market forces have been more than enough.<\/p>\n
<\/em>ANDREW LEVINE<\/strong>\u00a0is a Senior Scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, the author most recently of THE AMERICAN IDEOLOGY (Routledge) and\u00a0POLITICAL KEY WORDS<\/a>\u00a0(Blackwell) as well as of many other books and articles in political philosophy. His most recent book is\u00a0In Bad Faith: What\u2019s Wrong With the Opium of the People<\/a>. He was a Professor (philosophy) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Research Professor (philosophy) at the University of Maryland-College Park. \u00a0<\/em>He is a contributor to\u00a0Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion<\/a>\u00a0(AK Press).<\/em><\/p>\n