Defending the Indefensible

The Washington Post has a lengthy analysis of the recent disclosures of just how far the executive has broadened its powers since 2001: the use of "National Security Letters"--a kind of legal black hole about which no information can ever be disclosed by the recipient--to compel information from people or organizations; the military's databases of domestic 'enemies', including Quaker and student peace groups; and now the White House's unilateral decision to expand the NSA's surveillance powers to include warrantless eavesdropping on American citizens.

Combine this with the executive branch's assertion that it can detain 'enemy combatants' (which it alone can identify as such) indefinitely in prisons anywhere in the world, exempt from oversight, and you know that we're talking about Soviet-style governance here.

So, in the world of American politics, you would imagine that the party that opposes big government would be outraged, right? The GOP, which promotes itself as the last bastion of individual liberty, should be producing devastating calls for oversight, but its mouthpieces instead are howling at a free press that informs the public when the laws of the United States are being radically reinterpreted, possibly illegally.

Powerline attacks the Post's "sloganeering", saying that use of the term "spying on Americans" is out of bounds because:

Spying on Americans sounds like a bad thing until one remembers that we do it all the time when we have reason to believe that Americans are engaged in, or assisting with, ordinary criminal activities -- ones that pose far less of danger to society than terrorism.

Spying on criminal suspects does not, in fact, sound like a bad thing. The chuckleheads at Powerline pump this false argument for a paragraph without noting that the issue is the lack of oversight. That is, the problem here is that these are warrantless activities which, by definition, need no approval from anyone except the executive branch.

They go on to note that, "There are, of course, limits on the extent to which the government can 'spy on Americans.'" But that's exactly the point that's gotten muddied here. Those limits are a function of the co-equal status of the three branches of our government. The executive has just asserted that its power is supreme, thus all limits are out the window.

John Hinderaker throws this strawman out in conclusion: "Critics of the NSA's actions will always assume that the NSA's interception of messages to known terrorists overseas is illegal."

This is, of course, a fabrication. Those who are angry about this behavior are not angry that NSA is involved in counterterrorist activity, nor are America's editorial pages flooded with calls for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court, which issues warrants for the type of electronic surveillance that Powerline says is perfectly legal, to be shuttered.

We are, rather, deeply concerned about the concentration of power within one branch of a government that was designed on the foundation of three co-equal pillars. This type of concentration does not just point to the dysfunction of the branch accruing power, but to the dysfunction of all three. The Congress seems to have abrogated its own obligation to practice oversight of the Executive branch agencies that are repeatedly implicated in questionable behaviors. The Judiciary has generally sided with the Executive branch is the absense of statutory regulations on which to base opinions.

This is called a meltdown, and our freedoms cannot endure under a de facto dictatorship. There is simply no other way to describe an executive so empowered. Bush and his mouthpieces accept the legitimacy of dictatorship in America, and believe him to be a benevolent dictator. So what would he, and Powerline, call President Hillary Clinton so empowered?

They would, at long last, join people like me in calling such an executive what it is: Poison. Treason. Worthy of revolting against. It's unfortunate that the partisans of Powerline love their political party more than they respect our democratic institutions and our individual liberties. It's tragic that they will perpetually go to bat for an administration that is so openly willing to erode both.

Posted by shamanic at December 18, 2005 06:37 PM | TrackBack