An open letter to our new President on his first full day at work

[thatcrazycajun]

To: The Hon. Barack Hussein Obama
President of the United States of America
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20002

Dear Mr. President:

First off, let me offer to you my warmest congratulations on your election to the Presidency and making history in the process. While you have not broken the last of the barriers to the fullness of the American promise that "any kid can grow up to be President"—that won't happen until a homosexual, a pagan or atheist, a non-white/black person and/or a woman are elected among your successors—you have shattered an important one, and possibly the most painful, destructive one still lingering in this nation founded nearly three centuries ago in the original sin of slavery. For that alone, you deserve the thanks of a grateful nation and an honored place in history for all eternity.

I have never been prouder to be an American or a Democrat than I am this week. I thrilled with millions of my fellow Americans, on the National Mall in Washington before you, with hundreds of millions more in cities and towns all across the nation, and with others around the world to see you and your lovely wife, Michelle, and your beautiful daughters launched as our newest First Family. But that was yesterday; today is your first full day on the job, and I have some things I must ask of you.

I understand your expressed wish, now that you have won and are actually in office, to unite rather than divide Americans; and I do consider you far better equipped to manage this than the last man who made such a promise, namely your immediate predecessor. I fully realize you will need to work with both liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats, to accomplish the truly great things you wish to and solve the truly frightening problems and dangers we now face as a nation. I also know you will have battles to fight, and must husband your strength and clout and the tremendous goodwill you now enjoy, both here and abroad, in order to win any of them; and must therefore pick and choose these battles to some extent.

But there is compromise, and then there is capitulation; there is bargaining, and then there is betrayal. I leap to remind you, sir, that you ran as the candidate of the Democratic Party, on our party's platform. Your campaign made much of the themes of "change" and "hope," which I and many others took to mean change from the destructive policies of your predecessor and his party, and hope that America can be remade back into the light the rest of the world looks to. You made several promises in that regard during your campaign; and we in what former national committee chair Howard Dean called "the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party" are putting you on notice as of today that, while we wish you nothing but good will and high hopes for your success, we nonetheless fully intend to hold you to those promises. To name just a few:

• You promised to end our misbegotten military misadventure in Iraq, which over the last five years has cost us thousands of service folk's lives, trillions of tax dollars and untold losses of honor and goodwill in the world; and to bring our troops home from there for good within 18 months of your inauguration. I call on you to keep that promise, with no hedging, delays or excuses.
• You promised to close down the obscenity that is the U.S. naval detention facility at Cuba's Guantánamo Bay; to release those still being held there with no charges and no access to courts, some even after being told they were cleared and would be released; and to renounce and forbid torture in all its forms as a tool of information gathering for any US military or intelligence officer. Today's policy announcements in this regard are gratifying, but they are, as I am sure you know, only the beginning; freedom-loving fellow citizens anxiously await your follow-through.
• You promised to end your predecessor's wasteful and unethical tax cuts for the wealthiest 1 percent of our population and instead give tax cuts to those who truly need and deserve them: hard-working, financially suffering families in the middle class. I call on you to keep that promise in full with your first budget draft to Congress.
• You promised to change our energy policy to put serious effort and funding behind alternative energy sources, to end our dependence on foreign oil, and reduce our hideously large polluting footprint on the environment. I call on you to keep that promise, too. You can start by doing what your predecessor refused to do: sign the Kyoto Protocol, as every major industrial power in the world save us and China has done, and commit the US government to its goals for reduction of greenhouse-gas emissions. I would also ask that you rethink your support of nuclear energy as part of that plan, and support the continuation of the moratorium on construction of new nuclear power plants, until much more is done to assure the American people of their safety and the safe disposal of the radioactive waste they produce. There must also be more done to reduce the beggaring cost of building and maintaining such reactors, which is invariably passed on to ratepayers.
• You promised to make affordable health care for everyone a top priority in your administration, and end the scandal of over 45 million uninsured Americans and people choosing between paying their medical bills and keeping food on the table or a roof over their heads. You can begin keeping that promise by signing the newly-revived S-CHIP children's healthcare legislation your predecessor vetoed last summer, the instant it reaches your desk.
• You promised to preserve a woman's right to choose abortion as a solution to unplanned, unwanted pregnancy, as established by the Supreme Court in its landmark Roe v. Wade decision 36 years ago this week. I am pleased to hear you will be rescinding the infamous "Mexico City Policy" instituted by Ronald Reagan, ended by Bill Clinton and reinstated by George W. Bush, which dictates to non-governmental organizations receiving US federal monies what family planning services and information they may or may not offer in other nations. This is an excellent start on keeping that promise, and I commend you for it; but it is only a start. When the opportunity comes for you to name a new justice to the Court—as surely it will, at least once in your first term if not your second, assuming your re-election—I call on you to nominate someone who has both unimpeachable legal credentials and a firm, documented commitment to uphold Roe and rule against the religious right's efforts to chip away at and/or overturn this long-established precedent.

And after you have kept all of these promises, I would ask still more of you and the newly-strengthened, Democrat-led 111th Congress:

• As Commander-in-Chief, you must at once end the shameful, destructive "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy of our military. Open service by gay/lesbian soldiers, sailors, airmen/women, Marines and Guardspeople must be allowed by law once and for all. As the last Democrat to hold your job, Mr. Clinton, famously said on this issue 16 years ago, "We haven't got a person to waste."
• While you are removing our troops from Iraq, I would ask you in the strongest possible terms to also rethink continuing our military presence in Afghanistan, and anywhere else our own soil and people are not directly under threat. Neither nation's internal strife is any of our business, nor are they worth the shedding of one more single drop of American blood. Our Founding Fathers warned against "foreign entanglements," and your predecessor showed he learned nothing whatever from our previous fiascoes in Vietnam and elsewhere; please show us that you have learned these vital lessons. I realize we have allies we have made commitments to defend, and we should honor those commitments to the letter. But much of the antagonism and resultant terror attacks against our nation result from our misuse of our supreme military might to project American power and arrogance into other parts of the world; we need to be a humble, peaceful power that uses its military mainly for its own defense, never, ever fires the first shot and abides by the Geneva Conventions on warfare and the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
• You must also work to bring about repeal of the equally reprehensible Defense of Marriage Act, which undermines the "full faith and credit" clause of the Constitution with regard to state laws permitting same-gender marriage. And any and all attempts by Congressional Republicans and others to enshrine anti-homosexual discrimination in a Constitutional amendment must be vigorously fought by you from the White House.
• Since you voted in the Senate last summer for the provisions in the extension of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) immunizing U.S. telecommunications firms from prosecution or litigation for cooperating with your predecessor's illegal "warrantless wiretapping" program, you bear a special obligation to see these provisions repealed, and all such spying on the private communications of innocent American citizens ended. As a former college professor of Constitutional law, you should not need reminding that the document you just swore to uphold includes an explicit prohibition of exactly this sort of thing in its Fourth Amendment.
• On that same subject, you must work to see that the USA PATRIOT Act is repealed in its entirety, or at the very least, that its more egregiously unconstitutional, privacy-violating provisions are modified and/or sunsetted.
• You must order the writ of habeas corpus, a right of citizens under law in societies dating back at least to the Magna Carta, which was suspended by your predecessor in violation of the Constitution's Article I, Section 9, reinstated immediately and in full for all defendants accused of crimes in the US.
• And finally, there must be a legal reckoning for your predecessor Mr. Bush, his Vice President Richard Cheney, their subpoena-defying former White House adviser Karl Rove, and as many as can be apprehended of those who participated over the past eight years in the illegal and unprecedented expansion of executive-branch powers; the violation of Constitutionally guaranteed freedoms of U.S. attorneys and other citizens; the withholding of information and testimony lawfully requested by Congress; and the deliberate misrepresentation to Congress and the American people of the "need" to declare war on Iraq. At a bare minimum, you must immediately appoint a special prosecutor to investigate these crimes of the outgoing administration, with full powers and maximum discretion to uncover the truth wherever it may lead him/her.

You have 100 days from this date, January 21, 2009, to at least begin work on most if not all of these things you have promised and that I have asked. Should you fail in any of these particulars by that deadline, I and others will not hesitate to call you on it publicly and demand an accounting from you for such failure.

Millions of Americans have entrusted you with leadership of this nation and the free world; we Democrats have entrusted you with the leadership of our party. In both cases, you got there with our faith, our hard work and our votes. If you will forgive my bluntness, you owe us, Mr. President, and you owe us pretty damned big. Give us the first truly liberal Democratic administration since John F. Kennedy's, and we will reward you to the limit of our abilities. Let us down or betray our party's basic principles...and we will do our utmost to prevent you from winning nomination for a second term. The choice, sir, is entirely yours.

Sincerely,
TCC

Comments

[stevemb.livejournal.com]

I would also ask that you rethink your support of nuclear energy as part of that plan, and support the continuation of the moratorium on construction of new nuclear power plants, until much more is done to assure the American people of their safety and the safe disposal of the radioactive waste they produce. (emphasis added)

You describe the problem (correctly IMO) as one of public perception rather than actual engineering difficulty. That being the case, backing away from nuclear power would be the very sort of craven pandering you (again correctly) urge President Obama to avoid in other areas.

[terriwells.livejournal.com]

I'm with stevemb on this.