Loose Wire
George Will sometimes seems like a Cray supercomputer that is missing an important chip, way way down in the machine's cortex. He just seems to almost get it, and then he crashes. Maybe it's the software.
Let's look at today's abendment:
No Check, Many Imbalances
Okay, so far so good. Georgie was wrong to push for unlimited power - great. Congress never meant to empower his to do warrantless wiretaps when it approved war after 9/11. Check. If he thought he had these powers, why push for the Patriot Act? Good point.
Here's a patricularly good one:
"Anyway, the argument that the AUMF contained a completely unexpressed congressional intent to empower the president to disregard the FISA regime is risible coming from this administration. It famously opposes those who discover unstated meanings in the Constitution's text and do not strictly construe the language of statutes."
"Risible!" That means it's funny! "Strict constructionists" choosing to read extra powers into the words of congress and the constitution. Risible indeed!
Okay, so along comes Will down the path - NSA wiretaps are bad, Congress has power over the president (even citing the sainted Harry Truman's over-reach in the Korean War).
The Cray just clicks right along, churning out, well, stuff that a lot of other people are saying, but saying it as George Will. And then, CRASH!
"Immediately after Sept. 11, the president rightly did what he thought the emergency required, and rightly thought that the 1978 law was inadequate to new threats posed by a new kind of enemy using new technologies of communication. Arguably he should have begun surveillance of domestic-to-domestic calls -- the kind the Sept. 11 terrorists made.
But 53 months later, Congress should make all necessary actions lawful by authorizing the president to take those actions, with suitable supervision. It should do so with language that does not stigmatize what he has been doing, but that implicitly refutes the doctrine that the authorization is superfluous."
What the hell? That can't be the output - check the code.
Will's solution is to - quick! - find that the president was right all along to save face. See - we authorized it! All is fixed!
And how can anyone know whether "the 1978 law was inadequate to new threats posed by a new kind of enemy using new technologies of communication?" He won't even tell Congress what he did - how can we know what the challenge was? How do we know what the methods were?
And if you do it without stigmatizing what he's already done, you make Congress a rubber-stamp. Is that what your whole argument is - that the executive needs to get a Congressional ass-slap after the fact? Future executives need to take a few minutes to high-five the Congressional Intelligence Committees or else - what?
Because unless there is a real remedy and real oversight and real consequences for law-breaking, it will not end. It will only get worse.
How many more civil liberties do we need to lose before we realize that?
Let's look at today's abendment:
No Check, Many Imbalances
Okay, so far so good. Georgie was wrong to push for unlimited power - great. Congress never meant to empower his to do warrantless wiretaps when it approved war after 9/11. Check. If he thought he had these powers, why push for the Patriot Act? Good point.
Here's a patricularly good one:
"Anyway, the argument that the AUMF contained a completely unexpressed congressional intent to empower the president to disregard the FISA regime is risible coming from this administration. It famously opposes those who discover unstated meanings in the Constitution's text and do not strictly construe the language of statutes."
"Risible!" That means it's funny! "Strict constructionists" choosing to read extra powers into the words of congress and the constitution. Risible indeed!
Okay, so along comes Will down the path - NSA wiretaps are bad, Congress has power over the president (even citing the sainted Harry Truman's over-reach in the Korean War).
The Cray just clicks right along, churning out, well, stuff that a lot of other people are saying, but saying it as George Will. And then, CRASH!
"Immediately after Sept. 11, the president rightly did what he thought the emergency required, and rightly thought that the 1978 law was inadequate to new threats posed by a new kind of enemy using new technologies of communication. Arguably he should have begun surveillance of domestic-to-domestic calls -- the kind the Sept. 11 terrorists made.
But 53 months later, Congress should make all necessary actions lawful by authorizing the president to take those actions, with suitable supervision. It should do so with language that does not stigmatize what he has been doing, but that implicitly refutes the doctrine that the authorization is superfluous."
What the hell? That can't be the output - check the code.
Will's solution is to - quick! - find that the president was right all along to save face. See - we authorized it! All is fixed!
And how can anyone know whether "the 1978 law was inadequate to new threats posed by a new kind of enemy using new technologies of communication?" He won't even tell Congress what he did - how can we know what the challenge was? How do we know what the methods were?
And if you do it without stigmatizing what he's already done, you make Congress a rubber-stamp. Is that what your whole argument is - that the executive needs to get a Congressional ass-slap after the fact? Future executives need to take a few minutes to high-five the Congressional Intelligence Committees or else - what?
Because unless there is a real remedy and real oversight and real consequences for law-breaking, it will not end. It will only get worse.
How many more civil liberties do we need to lose before we realize that?
posted by fiduciary at 3:00 PM
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