There is no doubting Americans want change. One need only peruse recent polling that simply asks if the country headed in the right direction and you will consistently find less than 20 percent of the country feeling good about where we are as a nation.
But the unanswerable question remains: What will that change look like? For some, it will be putting an end to the Iraq occupation, others might cite universal health care, but a growing majority, will say it's turning the economy around.
This latter point his hardly surprising given rising gas and food prices, along with banks closing, and the financial mess created by the sub-prime loans. Addressing any of these would be change, but is it representative of the fundamental change we need?
The presumptive Democratic and Republican presidential nominees will spend the next 100 days offering different rhetoric in the attempt to convince voters their prescription for change is the right one for the country. But there is one issue where both candidates need to agree and their solutions to the problem should also be aligned.
As the Bush administration comes to a close and more information surfaces, it is clear we've been living in a constitutional nightmare.
Last week, the ACLU, through the Freedom of Information Act, obtained documents that the administration embraced brutal interrogation policies, including a previously withheld Justice Department memo authorizing the CIA's use of torture.
According to Jameel Jaffer, Director of the ACLU National Security Project, "These documents supply further evidence, if any were needed, that the Justice Department authorized the CIA to torture prisoners in its custody." He added, "The Justice Department twisted the law, and in some cases ignored it altogether, in order to permit interrogators to use barbaric methods that the U.S. once prosecuted as war."
Based on the information that we know, which is hardly complete, the current administration through its actions has redacted the portion of Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution that reads, "The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it," laid the brutality of Abu Grahib at the feet of "a few bad apples," and governed as if the Geneva Conventions was to be implemented when convenient and not a series of treaties ratified by Congress.
This is why I have been advocating for nearly two years that the next president and Congress must have a Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Without a systematic approach by Congress, embraced by the next president, to reverse this unfortunate trend, we will continue to have an executive branch with brazen authority to arbitrarily decide whether certain issues can be of such magnitude that they trump the rule of law.
We cannot continue to function as if the Constitution is covered by the shadows of uncertainty.
For all of the presidential rhetoric that invokes change, not much is being said about the state of the Constitution. It must be Congress that sets the tone, seldom in the country's brief history has a president willingly relinquished power.
This is one the reasons Washington is generally considered among the great presidents because he voluntarily relinquished power by choosing not to seek a third term when it could have been his for the taking.
But such examples are rare and judging by their support of the recent renewal of FISA -- which in my opinion violates the Fourth Amendment -- it does not appear that either McCain or Obama is likely to follow the Washingtonian model on their own.
We arrived at this point because of fear, which, more than any enemy, is the greatest threat to democracy. Fear blinds us to everything except what is perceived as our immediate self-interest; and that tends to be based on emotion.
Corrective measures must be taken to change the inverted order that has the government putting fear in its citizens because democracies only survive when it is citizens that put fear in the government.
Byron Williams is an Oakland pastor and syndicated columnist. He is the author of Strip Mall Patriotism: Moral Reflections of the Iraq War. E-mail him at byron@byronspeaks.com or visit his website byronspeaks.com