Gary Hart Calls on "the people" to Check Bush "Tyranny"

Two-time presidential candidate Gary Hart has drawn on writings of the Founding Fathers to define Bush's consolidation of power as "tyrany," and calls on the people to check this constitutional crisis.

A Simple Sequence of Logic:

Bush is concentrating executive powers under the "war on terror," which are not granted by the Constitution and are prohibited by Congress.

James Madison defined tyranny as the concentration of powers in one branch of the government.

Madison's solution to tyranny relied upon either Congress or the Supreme Court checking the president. Presently, Congress will not check the president, and no legal case is working its way towards a Supreme Court judgment.

Facing the failure of our system of checks and balances, Hart proposes the question, "Can what Thomas Jefferson called the "common sense and good judgment of the American people" help us now?"

Hart argues that the people can and must check the president's tyranny, but first they must wake up to the present constitutional crisis.

Note: The text above draws heavily on the March 27, 2006 article by Joyce Appleby and Gary Hart