Friday, February 17, 2006

Why are all these Senators getting in line to kiss the President's law-breaking ass?

Pat "don't call me Robertson" Roberts R-Kansas, Chair of the SenIntCom (maybe just SentCom?) claims that he's working on a deal with the whitehouse that would elminate the need for any investigation into NSA's domestic spying activities. Isn't this an admission that it was and is still illegal?

Ditto for Mike "I don't like red" DeWine, R-Ohio and his proposal:
"DeWine's proposal would exempt Bush's program from FISA. That law set up a special court to approve warrants for monitoring inside the United States for national security investigations." Washington Post, Feb. 17th

And the one I really don't understand, John Warner (R-Va), who says,
"It seems that's a logical place to start, to upgrade FISA given the extraordinary expanse of technology in the 30 years that have lapsed." Yeah, 'upgrade.' While were at it why don't we 'upgrade' the 4th and 5th Amendments? It's just like upgrading your computer. You take out that old RAM and just stick in new RAM. Totally painless....

Even Jay "yeah, that's right I'm a Rockefeller" Rockefeller (D-WV)just wines about not being able to vote on whether to conduct an investigation.

The only one who seems to have an ounce of integrity on this is Arlen Specter R-PA.

From the Post, again.
Senate Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., told a forum at Georgetown University Law School Thursday night, "You cannot have domestic search and seizure without a warrant." He is drafting legislation to require the foreign surveillance court to review Bush's program and determine if it is constitutional.
Well at least those liberals at the NYT are complaining:
Doing the President's Dirty Work
[snip]
For more than a year, Mr. Roberts has been dragging out an investigation into why Mr. Bush presented old, dubious and just plain wrong intelligence on Iraq as solid new proof that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was in league with Al Qaeda. It was supposed to start after the 2004 election, but Mr. Roberts was letting it die of neglect until the Democrats protested by forcing the Senate into an unusual closed session last November.

Now Mr. Roberts is trying to stop an investigation into Mr. Bush's decision to allow the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans without getting the warrants required by a 27-year-old federal law enacted to stop that sort of abuse.

Mr. Roberts had promised to hold a committee vote yesterday on whether to investigate. But he canceled the vote, and then made two astonishing announcements. He said he was working with the White House on amending the 1978 law, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, to permit warrantless spying. And then he suggested that such a change would eliminate the need for an inquiry.
[snip]
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1 comment:

post festum said...

I've been thinking the same things. Could it be as simple as their recognition that they've caught the Bush Admin. in a the most blatant constitutional crime ever?

Were any hearings televised on the question of the constitutionality of the Administration's end-around FISA law, republican senators would find it increasingly difficult to stick to their red herrings and misdirection tactics. They would have to find ways of responding to claims that Bush broke the law in the language of the law.

Once public hearings start, the inherent legal silliness of an executor of law "amending" a law before its been amended by the legislative branch should become increasing plain and impossible to consistently defend. Screaming terror terror terror will increasingly appear to be what it is during the testimony of constitutional scholars and justice department career lawyers. And even if you were willing to risk looking like a moron against the advice of your own staff legal counsel and a plurality of constituents, simply betting it all on the defense that "the war on terror should make the legislative branch practice deference in matters of national security" would not even hold up on cable news-talk shows, since the whole point of the FISA law was to limit the power of the administration to conduct warrentless domestic spying in the name of national security, precisely because of the administration's constitutional power to be the presumed arbitor of counts as a national security matter.

Carter's signing statement would be the iconic document, and with Carter still alive and publically calling Bush a traitor to the constitution, this whole thing has constitutional crisis written all over it. (I'll buy drinks for everyone the day that Carter gets called before congress to answer a few clarifying questions about why he and congress thought it necessary to restrict administration claims for warrentless domestic spying. A former president calls the current president a traitor while giving sworn testimony in front of congress...What the fuck you do then?)

Once the question is investigated publically, a constitutional crisis follows inevitably; but just how the crisis will be resolved? None of these boobs can see yet, and that leaves them scared and reactionary.

In the mean time they are hedging their bets...They may even think they have power over the admin by granting him this constitutional mulligan.

This might also explain the question I've had lately about the series of bizarre "White House Insider" articles that Moonie's "Insight Magazine" has been publishing lately. I've linked to two of these in the past, but I'm still not sure if this is a kind of echo of the "conventional wisdom" of RNC insiders, a strong message sent to party members (why use Insight??), or another sign that the capitalist class is trying to send out trial ballons to see if they can put Bush in play.

Saturday, 18 February, 2006

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