Kurt Daims

Daims sums it up neatly:

• "There's a fundamental question here. If Congress doesn't do this, shouldn't it be done anyway?"

That is the nub of the issue upon which, more than any other single one, hangs our modern dilemma: How do we, the people, administer the law when the administrators abrogate their duty? Don't ask the town attorney. Bob Fisher doubts putting such an article in the town charter would make a difference. According to Fisher:

• "It is an absolutely unenforceable type of question. The people in Brattleboro do not have authority to impeach. I don't have the authority to indict the president, nor do the police have the ability to arrest him based on such a vote."  

It's remarkable, given the gravity of the question, an American lawyer, and one in public service too, would consider the American Declaration of Independence not weighty enough an instrument to address tyranny. More than two hundred and thirty years ago, Thomas Jefferson put forward a few lines for the consideration of the framers of the constitution that addressed a similar occasion when a government failed to represent the best interests and aspirations of the people it "served."

 

I'm certain lawyer Fisher is familiar with at least a line or two of Jefferson's efforts. It starts like this:

• "When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation."

Thomas Jefferson was a president unlike the current incarnation, he being freely and fairly elected (albeit from "caged" voter lists), but he knew the potential damage a future president could do should the checks and balances on absolute power be weakened, or removed altogether.

 

Jefferson, a curious scholar, scientist, and philosopher, product of the enlightment that is the foundation of modern western civilization, was also a prolific reader, and writer. He chose his words carefully, and we can assume the order of his complaints against the injustices suffered the American colonists at the hands of the British occupation were reflected in the Declaration.

Jefferson based much of his essay on the writings of the English philosopher John Locke, who maintained "man" was possessed of "natural" rights; that is, he believed the individual embodies a representation of the whole. Therefore, injustice done to one was also done to all. He called these rights "unalienable," which means they cannot be separated from the individual.

 

He also argued that it was the government's duty to protect said individual rights, and that a government could only gain power through the free consent of the citizenry, who forever hold the right to abolish any government deemed unjust. These principles are inherent to the Declaration of Independence and integral to the just functioning of a democratic America.

Following two hundred and thirty-one years enjoying the fruits of freedom and liberty within the walls of the world's longest-lived democracy, lawyer Fisher responds to T. Jefferson's call for universal justice thus:

• "My response is if you can get me appointed to the U.S. Senate, I would be very grateful and then I would actually have standing to do something about this."

Getting elected to the senate is not necessary, the house of representatives would do. The democrats have the majority in congress. The representatives can table motions to impeach, as Dennis Kucinich tabled not so long ago, and they will go through committee, and perhaps a vote in the house. Then the senate can weigh the issue.

 

But both houses refuse to recognize the criminality this regime has employed from day one; (before day one if you consider jerry mandering the Florida voting rolls, and other pre-2000 election hanky panky).  

David Swanson took on the Herculean task of enumerating the known crimes against the constitution, and international law committed by the George W. Bush administrations, and it's longer than your arm. Any one of these transgressions, many openly acknowledged, would be enough in saner times to bring down any government, yet they remain. They remain, though George W. Bush now touts the lowest approval ratings of any president. His vice president is even less popular. Americans, most disagreeing with, if not outright despising their president, have watched the Bush wrecking crew carry on a seven year looting spree, a dismantling of the nation, while dragging the flag too through the mire, making of the country a pariah in the eyes of the world.     

It is the time for the winter patriots Jefferson hoped would sustain the nation to take the mantle, and remember the second paragraph of his great Declaration:

• "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

For Kurt Daims and his Brattleboro, Vermont confederates, the declaration of Vermont as a no-go state for profligate legislators on pain of the law could be the first shots of the next American revolution. Their first paragraph reads:

• "Shall the Selectboard instruct the Town Attorney to draft indictments against President Bush and Vice President Cheney for crimes against our Constitution, and publish said indictment for consideration by other municipalities? And shall it be the law of the Town of Brattleboro that the Brattleboro Police, pursuant to the above-mentioned indictment, arrest and detain George Bush and Richard Cheney in Brattleboro and extradite them to other authorities that may reasonably contend to prosecute them."