Courtesy of AP/Evan Vucci.

It is hard to ignore the blatant hypocrisy in President Obama’s recent Proclamation calling for May 1st to be official named “Loyalty Day” in the United States. While International Workers’ day or “May Day” has traditionally been a day for activists and unions to protest economic inequalities, the President seems to think it an opportunity for him to call for renewed “loyalty” to the constitution, a loyalty that he himself has had a poor record of demonstrating.

For starters, it is certainly odd for this proclamation to speak of honoring “the immutable truths enshrined in our nation’s founding texts” when, only four months prior, Obama signed a bill that completely ignores the civil liberties guaranteed in those very founding texts. Sections 1021 and 1022 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012, signed by the President on December 31st, 2011, contain several unconstitutional provisions that have gained opprobrium from individuals and groups as disparate in views as Dianne Feinstein, Ron Paul, Glenn Beck, and the ACLU. Under “Subtitle D — Counterterrorism,” Section 1021(a)(2) states that the executive branch can suspend both habeas corpus and due process rights to, “A person who was a part of or substantially supported al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or affiliated forces engaged in hostilities against the United States…”

While this might not seem so unfair at first, it is precisely the vague language in these sections — a very small portion of an otherwise extremely large bill — that leaves the task of defining who constitutes a terrorist to the discretionary whim of the military. What exactly does substantially or support mean? What are affiliated forces? Furthermore, since the bill has no exemptions for American citizens or American soil, it is licensed to treat civilians as enemy combatants and our homeland as a war zone. Considering the continued failure of the two-party system to address Americans’ outspoken indignation toward the country’s current crises, the most salient result being Occupy Wall Street, who is to stop the military from defining as a terrorist anyone who is hostile (e.g. participators in a global protest movement) by their terms? It doesn’t take a constitutional law scholar — like Obama — to see that NDAA is a direct threat to our First Amendment right to “petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

In the wake of this legislation, a group of journalists, including author and Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Chris Hedges, decided to sue the Obama Administration for its actions. In a case called Hedges v. Obama, filed in the Southern District Court of New York, Hedges claims that because his job as a war correspondent in the Middle East may demand that he be in contact with members of enemy forces like al-Qaeda, he and other journalists in similar positions could themselves be considered members of affiliated forces who support other terrorist organizations.

Thankfully, brave individuals aren’t the only ones taking a stand against this legislation. Last month, the state of Virginia passed a law that overrides NDAA, forcing Virginia law enforcement agents not to comply with its controversial detention provisions. Since upholding the rights that are guaranteed in our founding texts doesn’t seem entirely possible at the federal level, at least measures are being taken to protect them at the state level.

Unfortunately, the NDAA isn’t the only piece of legislation signed by the president that egregiously violates the constitution. In May of last year, Obama signed a four-year extension of the PATRIOT Act, the very law we freely accepted but came to abhor under the Bush Administration. Thus, the Fourth Amendment is ignored as warrantless wiretapping and excessive airport security screenings continue to intrude on the privacy of Americans, while the government is now given full access to “suspicious” (read: Muslim) student information from universities. According to a February article in The Nation, student privacy, previously protected under FERPA, is now freely given to the FBI:

Under Section 507 of the PATRIOT Act…all the government needs to access student information is to pull an ambiguous ‘under suspicion’ card, circumventing the Fourth Amendment altogether. The Obama administration is enabling Uncle Sam to dig even deeper with its accountability in education agenda, permitting school administrators to turn over a student’s personal information to state officials and private parties freely without student consent, effectively rendering useless the safety net FERPA once provided.

After signing the continuation of the PATRIOT Act by autopen from France, President Obama told reporters, “It’s an important tool for us to continue dealing with an ongoing terrorist threat.” Yet, after dealing with the platitudes and lack of transparency with Bush’s policies concerning the “war on terror,” it’s alarming to hear similar justifications for the exact same acts of infidelity toward our constitutional rights.

Those who first codified those rights, however, were aware of this inherent governmental potential for abuse.

In a speech he gave at the Philadelphia Convention, James Madison reminded those present that, “The means of defense against foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.” Madison’s prescience in this statement is perhaps something we should give renewed attention to, considering how the means our government is currently using to combat terrorism abroad are at the same time trampling on our individual liberties at home. If our government’s means for finding and defining terrorists are used directly against citizens they claim to protect, and if our attempts to “petition the government for a redress of grievances” are continually thwarted by an increasing militarization of police forces, then our defensive measures are not “defensive” at all: they have become a hydra of surveillance, policing, and illegally searching and seizing that devours its own children. The sheer symbolic potential of an opportunity like May 1st, then, takes on a meaning similar to Obama’s: demand for equality of treatment that comes from an increased fidelity to foundational texts. The hypocrisy is that Obama’s record doesn’t demonstrate him doing this.

It should therefore be no surprise that Occupy Wall Street announced on its website, before May 1st, that it was organizing “the first truly nationwide General Strike in U.S. history.” According to organizers, “For the first time, workers, students, immigrants, and the unemployed from 135 U.S. cities will stand together for economic justice.” Yet when May Day came around this year, rather than praise the efforts or even address the myriad grievances of the thousands of students, union members, and average citizens who marched in cities across the country, President Obama decided to encourage not criticism or demands for accountability, but loyalty, to the governing body that helped engender those very grievances. Again, it’s hard to ignore the hypocrisy.

It is clear that while Obama’s references to our founding texts seem serious and well intended, his promises of fidelity to them have proven quite vapid. The Janus face belongs in mythology, not the White House. Therefore, if the President is bent on making proclamations like this,

Through times of tranquility and the throes of change, the Constitution has always guided our course toward fulfilling that most noble promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve the chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.

then perhaps in our present throes of change he should demonstrate his own loyalty before asking it of his citizens.

Fidelity to Foundational Texts

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