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October 10 2007
President Bush made a speech today asking Congress to provide a blank check for surveillance. A committee of Congress voted 21-14 to recommend against retroactively changing the laws to protect vigilantes who carried out surveillance.
Senator Feingold said Congress, "'must reject the president’s demand for immunity for private entities that allegedly cooperated with his illegal warrantless wiretapping program while the president continues to hide his administration’s legal opinions justifying that program from Congress.'"(1)
Some of the Bush administration's own lawyers have said that there has been a series of illegal programs run. It appears to many that the Bush administration does what it wants instead of what the law says.
In the U.$. system of government, the president does not write the law. He only enforces it. The Congress has asked the president for years now to provide the legal justification and internal documents he used for his surveillance program, but he has not released the documents asked for.
This is an interesting question. Ordinarily we would say Bush would get his way, because Amerikkka will always approve more surveillance. Amerikkka also loves vigilantes. There has been a spate of nooses threatening Blacks recently.(2) So Bush has hope that the new FISA law he wants will come to be before the old one expires.
In this case, the problem is more that Bush said he does not need the Congress. If the president can do what he wants, and private companies and other government officials can always claim to have served the president, it raises the question of why we need a Congress. Ordinarily the courts would decide if the telephone companies, Internet companies and government officials violated the law.
The humorous part of this is that it is Bush asking for government intervention to save profit-makers; even though, he appointed the head of the Supreme Court himself. Apparently that is not good enough for him in this instance.
Usually Bush's simplistic political base would call making laws to protect companies "socialism." They are supposed to act responsibly to avoid going bankrupt. Not that MIM is going to back the claim factually, but one phone company claims it did stay out of the vigilante programs on the advice of a lawyer. Now Bush is asking that company to suffer economically, so that the vigilante companies can go scott-free.
In the U.$. system, plaintiffs and defendants can and usually do settle out of court, if there is a case at all. So Bush's request looks odd in that way as well.
Spying on Amerikans is here to stay. What the Congress is debating with the president right now is its own role and the question of rewarding vigilante mercenaries. Here is how the Washington Post explained it:
"Four possibilities are being discussed, said a Senate aide familiar with the discussions. The broadest would be blanket immunity, which would immunize anyone, including government officials, who had anything to do with any surveillance program. That is the approach the government favors and is strongly opposed by civil liberties advocates."(3)
Oppressed nationalities do not want to live in a vigilante society. However, Euro-Amerikans are the majority. It is possible Bush can rally enough whites to sideline Congress and retroactively protect vigilante mercenaries. If there were an actually functioning Bill of Rights, the decisions of both the Congress and President would end up overturned in court anyway. Instead of settling disputes out of court, the president goes to Congress to rewrite the laws to let vigilantes off the hook.
Notes:
1. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/10/washington/10cnd-nsa.html?hp
2. http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/10/nooses-on-the-loose-after-jena-6-case/
3. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/06/AR2007100601265_2.html