Controlling the Debate vs. Facing Facts: The Weakness of the Unilateral Executive

In commemoration of Martin Luther King, former Vice-President Al Gore gave the best speech heard in this country by this reporter, a Gore doubter, in some time. While challenging the idea that the President can act on foreign policy unchecked by Congress or the judicial branch (which Gore says should be called the "unilateral theory" of the Presidency), Gore also effectively linked the Administration’s tendency to bully questioners to its blindness to politically inconvenient facts, which leads inexorably to the unhappy results we are now seeing around the nation.

Or, as the well-known blogger Josh Marshall put it:

The point Gore makes in his speech that I think is most key is the connection between authoritarianism, official secrecy and incompetence.

In the speech, Gore showed how the Administration’s desire to ram through a Medicare drug benefit, any benefit, despite doubts from Republicans and Democrats alike about how well the plan would work is part of the Administration’s mindset, which equates controlling the debate with a total unwillingness to face facts: 

...when the Administration was attempting to persuade Congress to enact the Medicare prescription drug benefit, many in the House and Senate raised concerns about the cost and design of the program. But, rather than engaging in open debate on the basis of factual data, the Administration withheld facts and prevented the Congress from hearing testimony that it sought from the principal administration expert who had compiled information showing in advance of the vote that indeed the true cost estimates were far higher than the numbers given to Congress by the President.

Deprived of that information, and believing the false numbers given to it instead, the Congress approved the program. Tragically, the entire initiative is now collapsing- all over the country- with the Administration making an appeal just this weekend to major insurance companies to volunteer to bail it out.

To take another example, scientific warnings about the catastrophic consequences of unchecked global warming were censored by a political appointee in the White House who had no scientific training. And today one of the leading scientific experts on global warming in NASA has been ordered not to talk to members of the press and to keep a careful log of everyone he meets with so that the Executive Branch can monitor and control his discussions of global warming.

Well argued, Al.