Al Gore: Restoring the Rule of Law

"A president who breaks the law is a threat to the very structure of our government. Our Founding Fathers were adament that they had established a government of laws and not men. Indeed, they recognized that the structure of government they had enshrined in our Constitution-our system of checks and balances-was designed with a central purpose of ensuring that it would govern through the rule of law. As John Adams said: "The executive shall never exercise the legislative and judicial powers, or either of them, to the end that it may be a government of laws and not of men."

An executive who arrogates to himself the power to ignore the legitimate legislative directive of the Congress or to act free of the check of the judiciary becomes the central treat that the Founders sought to nullify in the Constitution-an all-powerful executive too reminiscent of the King from whome they had broken free. In the words of James Madison, "the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and jusiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny."