Just Don’t Shred the Constitution, That’s All I Ask

A friend writes:

“I’m beginning to think our only hope of choosing a national leader is to hold him/her to the standard of not f**king s**t up. Is that libertarian?” [edited for content – hey, this is a family-friendly blog!]

I love this! That’s exactly where I am right now. I carry no water (Hold no brief? Carry no torch?) for John Kerry, but George Bush is, in my view, a failure and a danger as president at some very fundamental level.

What really put me over the top were the recently uncovered so-called torture memos wherein some clever Justice Department lawyers argued, among other things, that the president might be legally justified in setting aside laws against torture due to the powers that inhere in the office of the president. This, to my mind, is nothing short of an assault on the very principles of limited, constitutional government, and the thought that the Bush administration sought legal justification for such a thing (even if they had no intention of putting it into practice) makes them dangerous in a way that goes beyond mere differences of policy.

As Jim Henley of Unqualified Offerings put it:

They represent a deadly danger to the American system and they are multiple. It’s not one guy somewhere, it’s a movement. Until the Republican Party roots them out, that Party is the enemy, not just of libertarians, but of anyone who values individual freedom and republican government. From the standpoint of liberty, there can no longer be any justification for preferring the Republicans to the Democrats.

Now, Henley’s a libertarian, but my friend isn’t. Yet he rightly (but partly tongue-in-cheek, no doubt) senses that holding government to a minimum standard of “not f**king s**t up” embodies a very libertarian insight. I’m no doctrinaire libertarian myself (anymore!), but one thing that libertarians harp on that more people could stand to take to heart is that the state is not to be trusted. This is true whether Democrats or Republicans are at the helm, but under present conditions, I’m inclined to agree with Jim Henley that Republicans (and especially those in the executive branch) represent the greater threat to liberty under the law, which is the cornerstone of our system of government if anything is.