OK, so the New York Times comes out with a story that President Bush has authorized wiretaps and surveillance on American citizens without getting warrants. Only took them a year of sitting on the story to do so, but I’m going to let go of the fact that they’re late to the party and celebrate the fact that they got here at all. So in this report from ABC News, we see Bush saying the following in his weekend radio address:
The American people expect me to do everything in my power, under our laws and Constitution, to protect them and their civil liberties and that is exactly what I will continue to do as long as I am president of the United States.
Anyone else having a problem with the notion of warrantless eavesdropping being a protection of civil liberties? If you want to make an argument that curtailing our civil liberties is necessary to protect the rest of them, then OK, we can have that argument. But this is ridiculous.
The issue here isn’t whether we ever need to wiretap someone. The issue is that we’re supposed to have a system of checks and balances where there is some oversight when the executive branch decides to do something. As Josh Marshall has been tracking over at Talking Points Memo, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act allows the government to start a wiretap and then get the warrant if speed is of the essence. I haven’t seen the explanation yet for why that system doesn’t work.
On Wolf Blitzer’s Situation Room, former Republican Congressman Bob Barr expressed his amazement that current Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher was enthusiastically backing the president:
BARR: Here again, this is absolutely a bizarre conversation where you have a member of Congress saying that it’s okay for the president of the United States to ignore U.S. law, to ignore the Constitution, simply because we are in an undeclared war.
The fact of the matter is the law prohibits — specifically prohibits — what apparently was done in this case, and for a member of Congress to say, oh, that doesn’t matter, I’m proud that the president violated the law is absolutely astounding, Wolf.
ROHRABACHER: Not only proud, we can be grateful to this president. You know, I’ll have to tell you, if it was up to Mr. Schumer, Senator Schumer, they probably would have blown up the Brooklyn Bridge. The bottom line is this: in wartime we expect our leaders, yes, to exercise more authority.
Now, I have led the fight to making sure there were sunset provisions in the Patriot Act, for example. So after the war, we go back to recognizing the limits of government. But we want to put the full authority that we have and our technology to use immediately to try to thwart terrorists who are going to — how about have a nuclear weapon in our cities?
By the way, note how Rohrabacher snuck in that slam at Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer there. Schumer’s name appears nowhere else in the transcript. But Rohrabacher wants to be sure to tell us that if a Democratic Senator from New York had his way, the Brooklyn Bridge would have been blown up.
Barr claimed at the end of the segment that the alleged threat against the bridge “was bogus because it had to do with a group of idiots who were planning to dismantle it with blow torches.” But let’s put that aside for a minute. Let’s look at this notion that threats to security justify violating the law or the principles of the Constitution. Take that logic out to its conclusion, and we may as well torch both. An open society carries risks. It lets people move around, get together, talk to each other, procure equipment, make plans, and so on. To completely close off those risks, you have to stop being an open society. Is that a price we’re willing to pay? You can cut down your risk of being injured in a car accident by never getting into a car. Don’t own anything and you’ll never be robbed. But very few are interested in going to that extreme. They’re either willing to take the increased risk that comes from freedom and convenience, or they just don’t think about it.
I’m not saying I want complete freedom and anarchy. I’m willing to accept that we give up some degree of total freedom for the sake of our well-being. But in each case, the trade-off needs to be justified. And I haven’t seen a clear case of how warrantless wiretapping has prevented a threat to our well-being that couldn’t have been prevented by getting a warrant. The burden of proof is on the administration here.
And take one more look at Barr and Rohrabacher’s exchange. Rohrabacher says we need to expand the government’s power when we’re at war, and that we’ll go back to recognizing the limits of the government when the war is over. Barr points out that we’re in an undeclared war, so how will we know when it ends? Especially against an enemy as broad and vague as “terrorists.” Does anyone really think we’re going to eliminate every single one any time soon? Are we going to be at war for the rest of our lives?