June

Letter-to-the-Editor of the Month

It will Take Courage

Eric Muench

June 20

EDITOR, Daily News:

We Americans enjoy our freedoms to travel, to live where and as we wish, to elect our leaders, to worship as we believe and speak our minds without fear, and to think of ourselves as permanently blessed by nature itself in the musically celebrated “land of the free.”

But some of us do not value these freedoms as clearly or as regretfully as did Germans after they allowed the 1930s conversion of their constitutional republic into a Nazi dictatorship. We too will have those people’s regrets if we are not smart enough to defend the rule of law.

What has enabled creation and growth over 200 years of America’s widely admired freedom and strength has been the democratic structure of governance that is set out in the United States Constitution.

This basic law of the land drives democratic government and also protects individual freedoms by demanding “habeas corpus” and “due process.” Ideas such as “innocent until proven guilty,” “rule of law” and trial by jury rather than by autocrats are guarded by the federal courts. The Constitution is the legal standard to which every state entering the union agreed and to which all other federal, state and local laws and regulations must conform, and to which every federal employee and office holder swears allegiance.

President Trump did, too, but rejects the limit on his power and would govern instead by executive order. Strong congressional oversight powers in the Constitution have been deliberately unused by the Republican majority unwilling to face up to the dangers of dictatorship in order to remain in Trumps’s favor. It has been left to the federal judges in our land to defend against executive dictatorship, but the courts have no enforcement army, while the president commands many police units as well as the armed forces, and he is using them with fearful force.

We are left with a stark choice: The rule of law (the Constitution), or the rule of a man (Trump) who will have achieved dictatorship if Congress lets hie and if the courts are swept aside by lack of enforcement powers and if we the people do not back up the courts and convince Congress or change its makeup.

It will take courage. But we must complete the musical refrain: “Land of the free AND the home of the brave.”