While broad dreams and great hopes attend a time of change, when a long era that looked backward is ending, and a new era searching for the way forward is starting - in each moment, on each day, at each time, there are tasks to be accomplished.

While we will, and must, and should, put forward ideas and proposals on these greater goals, the task of the next two years is to wrest control of the nation back into the hands of the people and their constitution, and out of the hands of an executive who proclaims that the framers intended a President to be dictator in time of crisis. George Washington denied the title of King, and FDR declared that America had no need of dicators, and if in those moments of intense crisis, bound by greater and more powerful evils than we now face - leaders could admit that absolute power is never an absolute necessity, then so it should be with our own moment.

Let us place this one task - to take back the right which has been taken, and with it remake the peace that has been broken - before all others. Because there is no budget bauble, nor unearned earmark which will, in the end, be worth the cost that will be charged, either by the future, or by the judgment of history.

First, it must be established that this moment is not as dire a moment as many which America has faced in the past, and which many of the peoples who have come here have faced in the past. There is no overwhelming wave of ideology sweeping the world into hysteria and frenzy. Instead, we face a more searching challenge of the soul, in that what was once the privilege of the few in the core Democracies, must now be the expectation of everyone, everywhere in the world. There can no longer be a world divided. We knew this day would come, and it has. The marvels of transport, communication, education, technology and social stability are visible to all, and within the reach of many.

Those outside will not be held out, not by ancient treaties, musty laws, closed contracts, or debts denominated in currencies that they do not have themselves.

Seeing our challenge, not as one of defending a small light from a great tempest of destruction, but of opening our hands and bringing real prosperity to all - we see that the only means to effect this change must be in the liberal spirit, and through a Liberal philosophy, which while different for its times, is also connected in to all of the great moments past in human liberty. Moments when a people declared that nothing more certain was written in the book of faith, than that all people's must be free.

We are faced, in truth, not with war, or even civil war, but rebellion and disturbance which could become civil war. In the history of the world, there is no civil war which was not writ large on clear and lucid signs, but that they were ignored by participants who hoped to buy the time they needed to escape with their wealth in tact. It has been far harder to avert a civil war, than to even to win one.

When this nation was founded, there was a chance to dispense with a vulgar and atrocious institution, self-admittedly peculiar. It would have been within the means of that moment, and would have produced far more wealth than it cost. And yet, enslavement was permitted to continue, almost unencumbered, for four score and more years.

This New Liberalism then is faced with a challenge which has eluded other philosophies and previous orders: to give up a self-enslavement, which in turn enslaves others. We are prisoners of our past.

Second, having set our task in proportion, it is thus made obvious that power does not need to be centralized into a single decisive executive, but it must be made to flow through out the nation and the nations of the world. We do not need a grim warlord in his bunker, jaw fixed against ever worsening odds, but instead leadership, at every level, which seeks ever improving conditions.

In the wake of a devastating and scaring attack on America, we awoke to how violent and angry those who wish to take the wealth of the world, while rejecting the enlightenment upon which that wealth rests, are. We awoke to how the ease and access of our own affluence could be turned against us. The attacks were not made by a counter order, with factories belching smoke and building battleships and turreting tanks – but by those whom we have paid for our resources, with the very tools that we built with those resources.

Fear and anger made Americans vulnerable, vulnerable to lies, half-truths and dark whispers. And in that vulnerable moment, we were swindled of our rights. The con man knows to call the widow grieving. So it was with us.

When unscrupulous speculators seek to dismantle a company, they do not use their own funds, but, instead, borrow, hoping to plunder the funds of the company which they are about to acquire. So it was with us: defrauded of our rights, those very rights were sold off, one and all, to pay back the backers of the fraud itself.

When ever a people come back into partial possession of their country, after a period of repression or hysteria, there is a temptation to deny that there had ever been an interruption at all, to go back, as if business as usual could be begun exactly where it had been left.

At all odds, we must avoid this error, and instead realize that we will never return to 1999, because history does not permit anyone to step in the same river even once: by the time you have set your foot on the sand, it is already a different river.

Thus the task for these two years is set. We will not pass the great projects of our age: universal and accessible health care here, and a restructured world economy abroad. We will not dent the debt which is the true legacy of this age. We will not set right the wrongs begun here or anywhere, without first having at our command the full range of freedoms which our nation was founded upon, and whose promise has allowed its peoples to twist and turn through many failures and disasters to this present day. Without the powers that inalienable right invests in the people, and only the people and in all of the people, there will be no progress on any other issue which any would care to name.

For there to be a New Liberalism, there must be a renewed liberty. Before we may extend a hand of help to the poor, or a hand in friendship to those who we currently fight – we must unshackle our hands from chains of woe and fear which we ourselves allowed to be placed there.

The first conflict will be over the war in Iraq, because that war has been the excuse for the great theft of our liberties. There will be every increasing warnings from a newly elected Congress, but we should all know, having seen the ceaseless example of his previous acts, that the Executive will not relent before idle warnings, but will instead seek to shuffle behind some legalism the same abuses which once, protected by his courtiers in Congress, he flaunted his flouting of the law in public.

The only powers which Congress has which are unattached to the veto of the executive, or the pleasure of the courts, are its own rules, and the power of impeachment. The courts cannot save us from ourselves, and so packed with followers of the reactionary revolution as they are, would hardly be inclined to do so if they could. It must be the people, through their representatives in the legislature who must act, and act alone, to resolve the crisis which we face.

That crisis is simply put: we were robbed of what is ours, because we are enslaved by what is not. We do not own the air, nor the products of millions of years required for the gestation of oil and coal. A single trio of centuries is set to exhaust what it took 3 billion years to create. Such a rate, and the civilization built on it, cannot endure. The policy in Iraq, though rationalized by fears, and justified by a false justice that convicted a man responsible for millions of deaths of a paltry few – is, instead, the results of our being enslaved to the extraction of the history of the world through the straw of oil.

The New Liberalism's task is to free the world from the chains of poverty, to free ourselves from an enslavement to extraction. To do so, we must free ourselves from fear first. That these are tasks for liberalism is evident on its face. The global task is to open to all the affluence that the modern world allows, and the task at home is to secure our liberties.

In these next two years, there will be distractions and temptations. There will be a fear of a great backlash from those who still are addicted to hate and terror. The screaming hysteria practiced by the unlamented Republican Congress will, like a ghost, haunt those who have so recently wrested control of the legislature from them. The executive will promise to place his assent on all manner of programs, so long as he is given his power to channel the fat of the land to the bread of his friends.

Do not listen to the serpent, cornered and willing to wheedle, but instead, strike at its head, and the body will die. That head are the authorizations to use force, since the Congress does not have standing to challenge any action of the executive under war powers, but must instead either revoke funding broadly, or impeach directly. The task then, is simplicity itself, assert that while the constitution has been temporarily evaded, it cannot permanently be defied – that the past does not bind the hands of the present – and that as the Congress can declare war, so too, can it declare peace.

If we are to, as we must, free the world, we must first free ourselves. If we are to free ourselves then we must first be free of fear.

Congress should therefore draft, and attach to every bill of public necessity which cannot be vetoed, a simple trio of measures:

• Revoke the present Authorizations of Use of Military Force;
  
• Create a standard for review of executive action, either by the legislature or by the courts, which will restrain the acts of the executive in waging war beyond the mandate given;
  
• And assert that no funds belonging to the United States shall be used in any manner to create an enduring presence in Iraq without the express consent of Congress, and that any such activities begun shall be immediately halted and liquidated to the best ability of the military. There will be no one left behind in Iraq.
  

It is a simple task, and we must set ourselves to it: to get out of our current political crisis, we must get out of Iraq, without delay.