While We’re Asleep and Distracted

While the world focuses on pirates at sea and President Obama’s latest forecast that the economy is gaining traction, Mr. Obama has quietly invoked state secrets to deny remedies to individual victims of constitutional wrongdoing, including torture or assassination.

He has claimed the right to pick and choose which laws to enforce based on political convenience, and evaded the accountability that comes with a presidential pardon. He has frustrated congressional oversight by the invocation of executive privilege.

In the Senate, he voted against the Military Commissions Act of 2006 as running roughshod over constitutional rights. In the White House, he finds nothing objectionable about the act’s crowning him with monarch-like authorities. He has enlisted 800,000 state and local law enforcement officers to spy on Americans under the beguiling umbrella of “fusion centers,” while the murder clearance rate remains a dismal 61 percent.

Alexis de Tocqueville, writing in Democracy in America (1835), forecast a world in which Russia and the United States would dominate. But he sharply distinguished between how the two would assert their influence:

“[T]he conquests of the American are made with the plowshare of the laborer, those of the Russian with the sword of the soldier.

“To attain his goal, the first relies on personal interest and allows the force and reason of individuals to act without directing them. The second in a way concentrates all the power of society in one man …

“The one has freedom for his principal means of action; the other servitude.”

That distinction is rapidly diminishing, to the disadvantage of the United States under President Obama.

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