2006-01-18 - 7:53 p.m.
The late congresswoman and educator Barbara Jordan said it best. She told the House Judiciary Committee, “My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total. I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution."
I cannot confirm the web rumor that President Bush has called our Constitution an (expletive-deleted) piece of paper. It is undeniable, however, that President Bush has diminished and subverted the Constitution by his admitted warrant-less wiretaps in our country.
The Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution is clear. It recognizes the right of us, the people, to be secure in our persons, houses, papers and effects from unreasonable search and seizure. Searches only can be reasonable if backed by a warrant supported by oath and describing the place to be searched and the thing to be seized. Courts consistently have recognized that our phone conversations, like our letters, are protected.
President Bush offers three pathetic excuses for his repeated shredding of constitutional law. The first one is difficult even for his most ardent supporters to swallow. Bush claims that the general authorization to go to war against Iraq also somehow included an implicit authority to spy domestically without a warrant.
In a 2004 Supreme Court ruling put it well. ''A state of war is not a blank check for the president when it comes to the rights of the nation's citizens," wrote Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.
The second excuse is equally laughable. In Bush’s rambling blurts on the matter he implies that the general powers of the president as commander in chief and chief executive imply some divine right of kings to modify, add to, and contradict the law as he sees fit. All he need do is chant the magic words of “security, terror or 9/11” and all is both justifiable and justified.
No Congress need vote on such a change in law; no court can review it. Suddenly there are no checks and balances and the other branches of government become ornaments to an imperial presidency.
The final Bush excuse is that rapid technology changes make speed a necessity and thus the warrant system is dangerously slow and cumbersome. It might sound plausible, until you realize the president already has the speedy outlet he wants.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 already permits government to get a search warrant as much as 72 hours after a search begins. Judges get assigned FISA duty and can be awakened with a phone call to write a handwritten quick approval. The approval can come by e-mail as well. Approval is secret, quick, and nearly automatic. Of nearly 19,000 requests in a quarter of a century, only four have been rejected.
How lame, inexact, speculative, punitive, or politically suspect must the Bush warrant-less wiretaps be that the administration has to avoid such an easy and pro-government process? We may never know the answer because Bush insists on both secrecy and his imagined right to continue shredding the Constitution and ignoring the existing statutes.
FISA also makes it a crime to circumvent the act by conducting wiretaps without a warrant. This makes our president an admitted criminal through his hundreds of warrant-less wiretaps. Bush also has failed in his constitutional duty faithfully to execute the laws and to support the Constitution of the United States.
Barbara Jordan spoke her ringing words to the House Judiciary Committee as it considered the impeachment of Richard Nixon. Now, once again, we need strong congressional voices to say it plainly, the remedy for George Walker Bush’s high crimes and misdemeanors is impeachment.
