Letters to the Editor
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Why they shouldn't impeach
"What rational reason can there be not to impeach this president? Please? Anyone?"
I don't much like my answers to these questions, but here they are anyway:
1. Vice President Cheney - If anyone could be more scary than Bush, it's him. Yes, I know, you could impeach him, too, but really it's not an option. One of them would be miracle enough; two would make me start looking to see if the laws of physics had broken down.
2. There's no good reason to impeach unless you think the President will be convicted - Remember what happened when Clinton was impeached: He came out looking better. Now, I realize this situation is different, but at best you're going to get a nearly party-line vote to impeach right now and fifty votes to convict in the Senate. That would allow the President to claim it was politics, not principle, and would weaken the Dems' efforts to increase their majority in the House and get real control of the Senate. I don't think that, right now, there is any realistic way to pitch the situation so that enough people would be convinced that the Republicans were all acting as partisan hacks and the Democrats were being principled. If we can't even get Susan Collins or Olympia Snowe to vote against the surge, we're not in a place where impeachment would be effective.
This is not to imply that there have been no impeachable offenses committed; rather, given the situation, there's no upside to starting the process right now. Even with Nixon, it took two years from the break-in to get to the point where the public understood what was going on, and even then it took the "smoking gun" tape to make the end game obvious.
I'm really unhappy about this, not so much because the President won't get impeached, but because the lack of a real threat means that he'll continue to feel that he can do what he wants. This Administration has no regard at all for the Constitution or law in general, and seems to take positive glee in ignoring constraints that every other administration has found daunting. It's upsetting and depressing.
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What I found really interesting about the interview...
...was the other part.
The part where he said that the whole problem was the wires. About how they didn't need warrants at all for wireless, it was the damn wires that had them tripped up.
Hunh, what? They don't need warrants for wireless? Didn't they go after a couple of Democrats who listened in on a wireless Republican strategy session and taped it a few years ago?
Anybody out there have a cell phone and think, before seeing this interview, they had a "reasonable expectation of privacy"?
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The Vision of the Founders
The War of Independence is also know as the American Revolution because it had two coequal results. The former British colonies on the eastern coast of North America became politically independent of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. At the same time certain principles of governance were established, including having the leadership selected by a system of voting, justifying its authority as having the consent of the governed, and, simultaneously, limiting the powers of those leaders. These limitations are enumerated in the Bill of Rights, the first 10 Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.
Since the Revolution Americans have fought fiercely to preserve our political independence and to defend the principle of limited powers. The assertion of a "unitary executive" with powers to exercise surveillance on American citizens without warrants is the antithesis of American political theory and tradition. It needs to be recognized and exposed as being alien to the institutions of our liberties and a threat to the freedoms that the Founders articulated and risked all to establish.
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FISA modernization and some blog whoring
I covered this interview in my blog, taking a somewhat different tack. (In part because I'm always late to the party --- sleep in too much and get scooped) What is really interesting to me is the portrait the interview attempts to paint,via lies by omission: one of an administration working in good-faith within the system.
As far as the tripped up by wires, one of the things in the FISA modernization plan unveiled in April was to strip out references to specific technology and make it electronic communication in general. I don't remember off the top of my head if that was an honest effort or some sort of subterfuge meant to weaken the law further. (To my untrained eye the modernization proposal was a very mixed bag; some if it could be called modernization and some of it simple gutting)
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Self-infatuation - the disease of the Serious must be contagious
Glenn writes:
"Instead, we have self-proclaimed "experts" like the Brookings Institutions' Benjamin Wittes trying to show how smart and thoughtful and knowledgeable he is (and explicitly describing himself this way) by writing in The New Republic articles claiming that these matters are far too complicated for even the most thoughtful experts (like him) to understand, let alone the hordes of simpletons acting as though they know Bush did anything wrong here by breaking the law."
Joe Klein in Jan. 2006 in an interview with Rory O'Connor
(http://www.roryoconnor.org/blog/index.php?p=155:
Asked for an example, Klein says, “The notion of calling it wiretapping is questionable, I think, although I’m still not entirely sure.
“People like me who favor this program don’t yet know enough about it yet,” he says, “Those opposed to it know even less – and certainly less than I do.”
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re: What a knee-jerk
Is stupidity just a knee jerk reaction with shooter?
Tsk.
How many fukkin times does it have to be explained this administration claims it has the authority to commit warrentless surveillance, the administration admits to warrantless surveillance. Warrantless surveillance is EXPLICITLY aginst Federal law.
No. The President has Constitutional powers that he claims will override the Federal Law in question. Even the FISA court agreed with that assessment. Meanwhile, all the time that said Fed law was putatively being broken, Congress was being briefed on it's existence.
A law created because a president abused intelligence powers and capabilities. Even without this EXPLICIT law, warrantless searches are unconstitutional.
No. Warrantless searches happen every day at the border and domestically. If you cross the border your laptop and body cavities can be freely searched with no warrant at all.
Do you want a country where a government agency can pry and spy into someones life without going through due process, where any government agency can suddenly declare, "we are above the law".
I always have to laugh at the high dudgeon some people affect when they have no evidence of being hurt in any way, and then turn around and demand Government provide healthcare and keep medical records, financial records, and social security records. I don't know if you are in favor of Govt healthcare, but one has to ask why phone calls overseas are more important; than having access to a list of all your diseases and what is being done about them. AIDS list anyone?
Conservative small government my ass.-- sajwan
I can agree with that. Government should be smaller and more conservative.