Our government is under attack, not from without but from within. I know that sounds a bit overly dramatic, a bit overwrought for some of you, but that does not make it untrue. There is a movement afoot that seeks to overturn our very system of Constitutional government, that seeks to wreck the balance that our Founders worked so hard to establish, and seeks to concentrate power in the hands of one branch of our government. And this time it is not the judicial branch that is pursuing power, it is the legislative branch that is seeking to usurp the power of the executive.

Since George W. Bush won the hotly contested 2000 Presidential election over Senator Albert Gore (D-Tenn), the Congress has sought to hamstring his administration, to derail any plans he brought forth, and to discredit any policies that he put forth that did not meet their approval. This in itself is not so bad, in fact it is the way the system usually works. The minority Party attempts to put up a principled opposition to the majority Party and uses all of the accepted means of doing so. And if they find themselves in the majority during the administration of a President of the opposite Party, they ratchet things up another level. Again, that is the way the game is played.

However, the Democrat(ic) Party has taken that business as usual and turned it dangerously on it's head. The Democrats, in their zeal to get George Bush have decided that anything goes in their war against Bush, and neither established Senate rules nor the Constitution itself will stand in their way. They are on a mission, and they will go through hell or high water to see it to a successful conclusion.

The Congress started shredding the Constitution in 2002 when it passed the BCRA, better known as the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill. The bill basically limits political speech in the time frame just before an election...in direct defiance of the 1st Amendment to the Constitution. The Congress decided that even though the Constitution says "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech", it would do just that in order to "clean up" the campaign process. Conservatives watched in horror as the President stupidly signed into law a measure that clearly conflicted with his oath to defend and uphold the Constitution of the United States, and watched in further shock as the SCOTUS ruled that an obviously un-Constitutional law was ruled to have passed Constitutional muster.

The assault was now on, and the President was going to be in for a wicked ride.

The next major blow to the normal operation of the legislative branch was the Democrat(ic) Party's move to unilaterally change the rules of the Senate, especially as it came to judicial confirmation. Democrat(ic) Senators, in an effort to deny the President his choice of judicial appointees, suddenly decided that henceforth a super majority of 60 votes would be necessary to confirm judicial appointees sent to the Senate. When Sen. Bill Frist (R-Tenn) attempted to rally the Republican majority to force a showdown on the issue, and to invoke the so-called "nuclear option" to deal with the Democrat intransigence, the much ballyhooed "Gang of 14" stepped in to save the day. What they did, though, was to basically uphold the 60 vote majority idea that has since spread to involve all sorts of legislation. Now a bill has to have 60 votes before it is sent to the President's desk instead of the simple majority that was needed up until the Democrat(ic) minority changed the rules in the middle of the game.

Fast forward to the present and you will see a Congress that is hell bent on assuming the powers that the Constitution reserves for the Chief Executive of the United States. While a group of Democrats in the House attempts to pass legislation that would infringe on the powers of the Commander-in-Chief to wage war in the manner that he sees fit, another group in the Senate is demanding answers to why the President chose to fire 8 U.S. Attorneys... who serve at the pleasure of the President. The House Democrats want to set up artificial timetables for troop withdrawals in Iraq and to "slow bleed" the military so that the President has to do as the Congress says in waging war. They seek to assume the powers of a de facto Commander in Chief, while emasculating the real Commander. Meanwhile, the Senate Democrats want to force the President into a position of defending personnel decisions within the Executive branch to the Legislative; they are trying to take away the power of the President to hire and fire as he sees fit by setting themselves up as an unconstitutional watchdog group!

Now, if we saw that type of action taking place in Bolivia, Brazil, or Argentina we would be shocked and outraged by the brazenness of the usurpers. Our Department of State would condemn it in the strongest terms, and the international community would at least feign concern for the rule of law.

So, why are we not calling the actions of this rogue Congress exactly what we would call it if it happened anywhere else in the world?

If it was anywhere else but here, we would be calling it by it's proper name.

Coup D' Etat.