We in San Diego are unfortunate enough to have the newspaper equivalent of Fox News in our own San Diego Union. This is the paper that until recently featured a "Prayer of the Day" on its editorial page.
Needless to say they cheerlead whatever the Bush administration says or does especially on Iraq. Now I normally just ignore this bird cage liner but I was interested to see what they would do with the spying case so this weekend I turned to the "Insight" section (who says irony is dead?) and read the editorial of head cheerleader Robert Cadwell.
My response to this craziness after the jump....
Robert J. Cadwell's rubberstamp approval of whatever the Bush Administration says or does has long since passed from editorial writing to mindless and transparent cheerleading, but with his latest piece Bush's strong case for NSA surveillance he has crossed the line into abject negligence to the readers of the San Diego Union. In his piece he states that the office of the President has the authority to conduct warrant-less surveillance of American citizens and that apparently all reasonable people would agree with this view if the only knew the facts.
The facts, as Mr. Cadwell sees them, are that Congress' authorization grants limitless war powers to the President, that the FISA court supports the idea of warrant-less searches based solely on Presidential power and that case law supports the outrageous idea that the Executive branch, embodied in office of the President, is somehow above both the other branches of the United States government.
I would suggest that Mr. Cadwell follow his own advice and "waited until a few more facts were known". If he had done that he would have known that, according to Senator Tom Daschle President Bush tried, up until the last minute, to force stronger language into the resolution condemning the 9/11 attacks including the words "within the United States" when discussing the authorization to wage war. Bush apparently felt that would allow the kind of surveillance that he later conducted - or perhaps was conducting already. This shows that Congress was unwilling to grant the kind of power Bush now claims was implicit in the resolution and that he was well aware of their refusal.
He would also know that one of the ten secret judges of the FISA court publicly announced his presence on the FISA court and resigned in protest when the spying was announced. The remaining nine have demanded that the Justice Department review the wiretaps applied by for the Bush administration and prove that none of the wiretaps they approved were obtained with information from warrant-less information. How serious an issue does the court consider this? One justice suggested that if the Bush administration does not answer their questions fully or if the Justices are dissatisfied with the answers that they could vote to dissolve the FISA court altogether. The Justices are prepared to voluntarily stop the ability to get FISA wiretaps against possible terrorists and invoke an immediate constitutional crisis over this issue.
Once we "know the facts" it is clear that both the other branches of government do not approve the President's actions and are, in fact, demanding answers about how such spying could have occurred when neither of the other branches approved it. This has truly the makings of a true Constitutional crisis. One branch of the government has run amok and has acted directly in opposition to the stated will of other two. Since the branch of government is the executive the obvious legal recourse is investigation and possible impeachment. Mr. Cadwell characterizes the calls for impeachment of President Bush as coming from a "howling mob". If by howling mob he includes Barron's Magazine (the publishers of that leftish commie rag The Wall Street Journal) and former Counsel to President Nixon John Dean then his definition of "mob" has been somewhat expanded beyond mine. In an editorial on Barron's calls for a resolution of this constitutional crisis stating, "Willful disregard of a law is potentially an impeachable offense. It is at least as impeachable as having a sexual escapade under the Oval Office desk and lying about it later. The members of the House Judiciary Committee who staged the impeachment of President Clinton ought to be as outraged at this situation. They ought to investigate it, consider it carefully and report either a bill that would change the wiretap laws to suit the president or a bill of impeachment.". John Dean has characterized Bush's speech about this spying on American citizens as "the first President to admit to an impeachable offense."
Were this spying limited to a short period - say 30 days or even 6 months - after September 11th 2001 and subsequently the members of Congress and the Judicial branch had been informed about it then this issue probably would pass as a necessary evil. Obviously, extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures but instead President Bush boldly proclaimed that the executive branch was still executing this program and would continue to do so unapologetically. If the other two branches of the government, and the American people, allow this program to stand we will be acquiescing to a permanent elevation of the office of President to above the other branches of government freed from the bounds of laws or court orders.
The reason a President is bound by law and not by the judgment of the man in office is because we can never count on the individual judgment of a man over the collective judgment of the entire government. If the President can ignore the laws passed by Congress then what limits is he bound by? Could his administration rule that any law that thwarts the president's will is, by definitional, unconstitutional to endorse torture? Could he imprison an American citizen without formal charge for years? Could he sanction the execution an American citizen to death without trial or even charge? Spy on its citizens without review, or even knowledge of, the rest of the government?
This administration has done all these things and if it is the "howling mob" that is calling for the impeachment of President Bush then I am a proud member of that mob.