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Finally, an apt moniker for the GOP-led Congress that doesn’t include
barnyard metaphors or sailor’s expletives. And why do we think Congress has gotten so bad? Because it’s not doing
what it is intended to do, provide checks and balances through oversight. The
rubber stamping must end before the Constitution is shredded and we have
something else than representative democracy. Color highlights, italics, mine. kwc Kabuki Congress
NYT Editorial, Monday,
March 06, 2006
It's
a familiar pattern. President Bush ignores the Constitution and the laws of the
land, and the cowardly, rigidly partisan majority in Congress helps him out by
rewriting the laws he's broken. In 2004, to take one particularly disturbing example,
Congress learned that American troops were abusing, torturing and killing
prisoners, and that the administration was illegally detaining hundreds of
people at camps around the world. The chairman of the Senate Armed Services
Committee, John Warner, huffed
and puffed about the abuse, but did nothing. And when the courts said the detention camps
do fall under the laws of the land, compliant
lawmakers simply changed them. Now the response of Congress to Mr. Bush's domestic
wiretapping scheme is following the same pattern, only worse. At first, lawmakers expressed outrage at the warrantless
domestic spying, and some Democrats and a few Republicans still want a full
investigation. But the Republican leadership has already reverted to form. Senator
Arlen Specter, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has held one
investigative hearing, notable primarily for Attorney General Alberto
Gonzales's refusal to answer questions. Mr. Specter then loyally produced a bill that actually
grants legal cover, retroactively, to the one spying program Mr. Bush has
acknowledged. It
also covers any other illegal wiretapping we don't know about — including, it appears, entire "programs" that could
cover hundreds, thousands or millions of unknowing people. Mr. Specter's bill at least offers the veneer of judicial oversight from the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Court. A far more noxious proposal being floated by
Senator Mike DeWine, Republican of Ohio, would entirely remove intelligence
gathering related to terrorism from the law on spying, known as the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act. Let's call this what it is: a shell game. The question is
whether the Bush administration broke the law by allowing the National Security
Agency to spy on Americans and others in the United States without obtaining
the required warrant. The White House wants Americans to believe that the
spying is restricted only to conversations between agents of Al Qaeda and
people in the United States. But even if that were true, which
it evidently is not,
the administration has not offered the slightest evidence that it could not
have efficiently monitored those Qaeda-related phone calls and e-mail messages
while following the existing rules. In other words, there is not a shred of
proof that the illegal program produced information that could not have been
obtained legally, had the administration wanted to bother to stay within the
law. The administration has assured the nation it had plenty of
good reason, but there's no way for Congress to know, since it has been denied
information on the details of the wiretap program. And Senator Pat Roberts, the
chairman of the Intelligence Committee, seems bent on making sure it stays that
way. He has refused to permit a vote on whether to investigate the spying
scandal. There were glimmers of hope on the House side.
Representative Heather Wilson, the New Mexico Republican who heads one of the
subcommittees supervising intelligence, called for a "painstaking"
review of the necessity and legality of the spying operation. But the chairman
of the House Intelligence Committee, Peter Hoekstra, is turning that into a pro forma review that would end with
Congress rewriting the foreign-intelligence law the way Mr. Bush wants. Ms. Wilson still says that the House needs to get the facts before it rewrites the law, and we hope she sticks to it. But she's
facing a tough race this fall, and her staff has already started saying that,
well, she never called for "an investigation," just "an
oversight review." Putting on face paint and pretending that illusion is
reality is fine for Kabuki theater. Congress should have higher standards. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/06/opinion/06mon1.html?hp ALSO SEE AG Gonzales denies
more extensive NSA spying but Rep. Jane Harman isn’t backing down. In a statement, Hoekstra and Harman also
said their committee will hold hearings on the 1978 Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act, "with an eye toward modernizing it to account for
current and future technological advances." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/02/AR2006030201783.html How the Patriot Act came in from the cold: The addition of some new civil liberties
protections made the Patriot Act's final lurch toward passage possible. To
critics, these changes are but tissue-paper defenses. But the bill's defenders
say its provisions are necessary - and that much of the opposition to the Patriot Act is driven, not by
the bill itself, but by opposition to administration domestic-security policies.
"It's not about the Patriot Act
per se. It involves larger questions of mistrust for the Justice Department and
the White House," says James Andrew Lewis, director of the
technology and public-policy program at the Center for Strategic and
International Studies (CSIS) in Washington. http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0303/p01s03-uspo.html |
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