Could We Have Another Watergate?
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Could we have another Watergate?
“Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” a quote by Lord Acton. The founders of the Constitution saw that any one person with a great deal of power was going to be corrupt, and they were right in saying that. Therefore, when the founders sat down to draw up the Constitution, they believed that there should be a system of checks and balances, where once branch of government could not have more power than another branch of government. Each of the branches must have the leadership and the courage to do its job. For, if the Congress and the courts are passive in the face of a presidents assertion of excessive power, and the people are uninformed of the danger, the country can once again face the loss of precious constitutional freedoms. In the case of the Watergate scandal President Nixon was an aggressor, and believed that the President should have more power than the founding fathers intended the President to have. The same case could be made about the present President of the U.S., George W. Bush, with the Bushs administration putting forth the Patriot act.
Richard Nixon was a great President, except for the Watergate scandal. The Watergate scandal will forever taint the Nixon Presidency, as it should, because Nixon was trying to abuse his power of the President to maintain the position of President, a move that was not necessary because he was the better candidate than the Democratic candidate, George McGovern. The Watergate scandal was the culmination of a series of criminal acts authorized by Nixon and carried out by his in-house secret espionage team to maintain his power, smother dissent and punish his enemies. What is even more startling to the Watergate scandal is that Nixon believed that he had every right to commit the crimes he had. Nixons goal in the Watergate scandal was to tap the Democratic National Committee headquarters, but the bigger goal was to be elected President again, and he was going to stop at nothing to achieve his goals.
We could be going through another Watergate like period in the United States right now with the George W. Bush administration. George W. Bush is has passed the Patriot Act which allows for the government, even more the President, to constitute sweeping federal wiretapping, secret searches and seizures, arrest and detention without trial or right to counsel, infiltration by FBI agents in our places of worship and in our social and political clubs and associations. Not even what we read, either from libraries or bookstores, is respected. The Bush administration has been able to get away with so much because Congress has been controlled by Republicans, and his propaganda