What I want to know from prospective Democratic nominees

posted by Bill Arnett @ 1:00 PM Permalink

I rarely watch those insipid presidential debates. It's too much like watching a game show where everyone wants to play "gotcha" and answer stupid questions that rarely hold any significance. Especially the "lightening round" types of questions that reduce the candidates to game show contestant status. Ridiculous.

There are, however, some questions I would like to have asked:

1. If you are elected will you renounce forever the theory of a "unitary executive" with powers not spelled out in the Constitution?

2. Will you commit to open government again and end all attempts to block people from obtaining information?

3. Unlike bush, will you commit to restoring the checks and balances of our Constitution and restoring habeas corpus?

4. If elected will you work with both bodies of congress to outlaw and end forever "signing statements" that simply spell out future intent to abrogate the law and ignore inconvenient portions of legislation signed into law? Will you work to insure that any past or future signing statements are of no legal consequence whatsoever in any American court?

5. Will you commit to not using American military forces except as a last result and not the first? Will you eliminate the proposed "future combat system" based upon dozens of unknown and yet to be invented technologies that will cost untold billions of dollars to "maybe" make it work? And then use that money to the benefit of Americans?

6. Will you once again sign back onto treaties such as the NPT and actually work to eliminate nuclear weapons?

7. Will you renounce the neocon dream of using American military might to invade and conquer countries in order to obtain their natural resources?

8. Will you call for the immediate resignation of each and every person appointed to office or hired by the bush administration and replace them not with cronies, but people actually qualified to do the job?

9. Will you agree to submit America to the jurisdiction of the International Court at the Hague and aid that court in prosecuting any and every current government official shown to have committed war crimes?

10. Will you genuinely stop the practice of kidnapping citizens of other countries for the purpose of torturing them and holding them in confinement forever with no hope of a hearing in court? Will you put an end to Gitmo and the secret "black prisons" of the CIA?

11. Will you stop all the bellicosity of the bush administration and recognize other countries rights to handle their affairs without threat of "regime change" simply because you might disagree with that form of government?

12. Will you stop the insanity of sending every borrowed dollar into the black hole of Iraq and instead use American funds to the benefit of the poor, the young, the elderly, the infirm, and to help the least of those among us?

I could go on all day with the issues and questions I would like the have asked and answered by our candidates for the Democratic nominee for president.

I'm afraid that any equivocation in answering any of these questions would cost that candidate my vote and would indicate to me that we are in line for more of the same old $hit if the equivocator is elected.

But I'll wager none of these questions will ever be asked and I have to wonder why.

Labels: Bush, cheney secrecy, civil liberties, civil rights, diplomacy, foreign policy, hegemony, neocons, presidential candidates, Torture, US Constitution, war crimes