Letters to the Editor
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Glenn -- more, please!
GG:
There are ways for Congress to act here in order to enable or even compel a court to rule on the legality of the NSA warrantless eavesdropping program.
I think some others mentioned this previously, Glenn, but if you have the time, I'd really appreciate it if you would expound on this further.
My feeling on the situation is that Congress' oversight powers are the only real hope for halting Cheney's despotic power grab in anything like a reasonable amount of time. Honestly, I can't see anything good happening until after the gang leaves office. I'm not even sure they will leave office, but we can try asking them nicely.
I see no hope for anything legislative being able to curb the WH; we just don't have enough Dems yet, especially in the Senate.
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Glenn
I second psyberdawg's request for more on this. I'm getting an enormous amount of resistance over at Daily Kos, where I do most of my blogging, to the idea that these scandals (both the wiretaps and the USA) could ever be resolved by congress in the courts. The party line there is rapidly coalescing around the idea that the courts will almost surely side with the administration, and that congress therefore is left with two options.
One, inherent contempt, which I know little about and have no idea how it would be enforced. And two, impeachment, which I give next to zero chance of succeeding if attempted at this point, and a high chance of blowing up in Dems' faces if they try (which is why I believe that they won't, and that it's doubly futile to try to convince them otherwise).
I continue to view congress's persuing these scandals in the courts as our best bet, and not as futile as some believe that it is. Sure, there are many potential and likely obstacles, as I've outlined in other comments, and not a few dangers. But it's not a done deal as I see it, and I just don't see any other option being more promising at this point.
Just wondering what you think, as a lawyer, even though I understand that you've never practiced law in that particular jurisdiction--i.e. the DC District and Circuit, and SCOTUS. Is there more reason to believe that the courts will side with congress, or with the administration, even if the former presents the most compelling case possible (and what might that be)? And do the potential benefits outweigh the risks, or vice-versa?
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making corrections during the endgame...
Where I'm pessimistic is in doubting that a new round of legislation will have any more lasting effect than the post-Watergate legislation, including FISA itself.
WT, I might agree with you more (being naturally pessimistic about government-- it's my age) ...but, now we have the internet. We had nothing comparable during Vietname/Nixon/Watergate.
There are enough blogs with the expertise, as well as their own communities of readers/commenters with their own expertise to evaluate things as they come down the pike. Congress may not see it yet, but I suspect that legislation is going to become a lot more collaborative in the future.
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Mona, I'm not even a libertarian, but I'm with you on this one...
I'm not, to understate, a Rand fan. [Ditto!] But she ardently opposed lying... [And ditto!]
...among many other things, such as not giving value for value, as well as for taking advantage of a situation by using the government as a hammer against others, and for just plain cheating (except in love).
I suspect that if the truth were known, a lot of the neocons and the younger members of the Parrots of Versailles would consider themselves as followers of Rand, paying their own form of tribute or homage to her principles. PLEEEZE!!! I'd love to read her reaction to the current Media coverage... most likely, she'd tear them all to shreds.
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Mona,
You just can't deal with the fact that your libertarianism IS vulgar libertarianism. It's that "suburban living room cocktail party" libertarianism. Why don't you read some people who have a bit more grounding in the subject instead of being a silly and shrill old woman with absolutely no clue as to what you are talking about and espousing. Calling me a "socialist" is hardly an insult. Besides, you wouldn't recognize a real socialist if one bit you on the ass. You are a vulgar libertarian and you don't even know Jack. And I think Jack London was a socialist. Everyone to the left of you is a "socialist". Chavez must be a communist! Smell the glove, Mona.
Vulgar Libertarianism Watch, Part 8: Intellectual Whoring for the Planter Aristocracy
(Via Larry Gambone on the Mutualists yahoogroup). Seth DeLong has an interesting article on Venezuelan land reform at Z Magazine.
As DeLong points out, Chavez's land reforms are considerably more cautious than those of, say, Arbenz in Guatemala fifty years ago. (Not that the latter were unjustified; even from an orthodox Lockean standpoint, let alone a Tuckerite or Georgist one, the claims of the great landlords there didn't bear much looking into.)
(...)
Naturally, all hell has broken out on the Right. A Washington Post editorial referred to Chavez as "a disciple of Castro" and warned in hysterical terms of his threat to "democracy and free enterprise" (for an idea of the kind of "democracy and free enterprise" the U.S. government and its lapdog press would like to see in place of Bolivarianism, check out this quote from the opposition leader). Carlos Ball of the CATO Institute, in a predictable vulgar libertarian exercise in mirror-imaging, characterized the land reform policy as “Chavez’s Land Grab,” and asserted that for Venezuela “Private property is history.”
Given the origins of the landed elite's holdings in state grants rather than appropriation by labor, it would be more accurate to say that legitimate private property in land will exist for the first time with the breakup of the quasi-feudal latifundia.
(...)
The alleged "free market" libertarians who defend such a system of land ownership are not advocates of private property--they are what Jerome Tuccille called "anarcho-land-grabbers" in a 1970 article in The Libertarian Forum:
Free market anarchists base their theories of private property rights on the homestead principle: a person has the right to a private piece of real estate provided he mixes his labor with it and alters it in some way. Anarcho-land grabbers recognize no such restrictions. Simply climb to the highest mountain peak and claim all you can see. It then becomes morally and sacredly your own and no one else can so much as step on it.
That, or something like it, is pretty much how most of those "private property" titles came into existence in the first place--if they even saw the land at all, rather than having it granted sight-unseen by a pope or king drawing a line on the map. In all such cases, the so-called "owner" is nothing but a feudal lord, who with the state's help is in a position to collect tribute from the first person to homestead it with his own labor. In other words, a tax farmer who robs the legitimate first owner.
As that old disciple of Castro, Ludwig von Mises, put it in Socialism:
Nowhere and at no time has the large-scale ownership of land come into being through the working of economic forces in the market. It is the result of military and political effort. Founded by violence, it has been upheld by violence and by that alone. As soon as the latifundia are drawn into the sphere of market transactions they begin to crumble, until at last they disappear completely. Neither at their formation or in their maintenance have economic causes operated. The great landed fortunes did not arise through the economic superiority of large-scale ownership, but by violent annexation outside the area of trade.... The non-economic origin of landed fortunes is clearly revealed by the fact that, as a rule, the expropriation by which they have been created in no way alters the manner of production. The old owner remains on the soil under a different legal title and continues to carry on production.
(...)
Unfortunately, as Joseph Stromberg points out, the school of "libertarianism" that usually wins out under state capitalism is the one whose idea of the "free market" translates into "Them pore ole plantation owners need all the help they can get..."
(...)
Fortunately, the authorities and planters of today have the CATO institute to put it all into scholarly language for them.
Incidentally, the right-wing furor to date has been a response entirely to Chavez's distribution of government land to peasants. Given such a strong reaction on the American Right to homesteading of government land by actual cultivators, one has to wonder how the so-called "Sagebrush Rebels" would react to the U.S. government opening up its lands to small-scale homesteading, instead of continuing to allow preferential access by mining, lumber, oil and agribusiness companies at heavily subsidized rates. A coup d'etat, perhaps? The irony is that they'd probably get Milton Friedman to advise them, and the neocon think tanks would praise them to high heaven for restoring the "rule of law." They'd certainly get the imprimatur of Carlos Ball and other vulgar libertarians, whose idea of "market liberalism" is whoring for whatever benefits the rich.