America... Spying on Americans

Yes, I understand you believe that to be the case. It will be interesting to see how the Youngstown argument plays out before the SC with regard to the current subject matter, but I don't think it's application will go as broadly as you are convinced it will.



And I believe I've mentioned the Keith opinion several times to point out how the Supreme Court has set foreign intelligence surveillance separate and apart from other surveillance.

So, you agree that there must be some method for determining which kind of information is, in fact, being surveiled, Tico?

What would you suggest that method be? Keep Constitutionally mandated Civil Rights protection in mind when you answer, thanks.

Cycloptichorn

And the Executive branch can only take actions as long as they are permitted by the Constitution. And the Judiciary branch can only take actions as long as they are permitted by the Constitution.

It is a given that the Constitution trumps the powers of any and all body of government.

The concept of the Founders was a triumvirate of equal power holding each other in check.

Each branch of government, at any given time, executes on powers it believes it has been granted by the Constitution. A test of the validity of that belief may or may not be in the offing.

There is no one branch that is immune from the influence of the other two.

Why knucklehead Joe Nation has pointed out that an amendment to the Constitution is not dependent on a populist vote is beyond me.

The governing concept is that the Judiciary is not permitted to be the absolute arbiter of all issues in dispute. The history of the US is replete with amendments to the Constitution. None have happened in our life times and therefore it is possible that some of us may believe none ever will, but this is a flawed perception.

The very nature of politics is power. It is foolish (and impossible) to expect that the the three branches of government will not test the boundaries of their Constitutional powers.

It is ridiculous to contend that the Executive branch should go to the Legislative branch, hat in hand, for a determination on what the Executive branch might do.

The real issue here is not whether or not the Executive branch has violated a prescription of the Legislative branch, it is how the Judicial branch will perceive the Executive branch's action in terms of the Constitution; empowerment.

Bottom line is that pronouncements of legal violation by the Executive branch are premature.

Who said the executive branch had to go to the legislature or the courts to decide what it could do? As Tico said, the President is free to do whatever in the hell he wants. The courts and the legislature are free to respond. Congress could well impeach a President before it ever gets to the courts if they feel the violation is egregious. The courts could decide a President's action is illegal but they have no power to enforce their ruling if the legislature sides with the President.


The courts are bound by the constitution. The constitution is by the people. The courts are seen as the last refuge of the people for an overreaching Executive or legislative branch. The people have the ability to overrule the courts with an amendment.

A law exists. The president has circumvented that law. Either the law is unconstitutional or the President violated it. There aren't really any other choices.

We're not far afield, and yet so far removed.

The three branches push as hard as they can for power.

You and your compadres would impose a standard of care on the Executive Branch that rises far beyond what the Constitution calls for.

Maybe this belongs on another thread, but here is the "I" word again.......

Published on Friday, January 27, 2006 by the

Texas Observer

Impeach or Indict Bush and Cheney
by Ronnie Dugger

The year 2006 will be historic for the nation, and probably for humanity. Texans Bush and Rove and their conspirators in the second Bush presidency have disgraced American democracy at home and in the world with debasements of our nation and our values that have now entered their climactic phase. What part will the rest of us Texans play in this decisive year?

As I have written in a review-essay that appears in the tenth-anniversary spring issue of Yes!, the quarterly of new solutions published in Washington state by David and Frances Korten (YesMagazine.org), we are living and working in the very days and nights of the American Emergency, the climactic American Crisis. Our elections are bought, and our government is run by and for the major transnational corporations. Bush announced in 2002 his illegal presidential policy that the United States can and will attack other nations first, waging war on them, when he so decides. He is now waging, as if he were doing it in our names, a bloody war of aggression against Iraq, which on the face of it is a crime against humanity under the Nuremberg principles that we and our allies established and enforced with hangings after World War II. The President, the Vice-President, and their factors sold this war to Congress with twistings and lies that were crafted to infuriate and terrorize us about Iraq's alleged connections to Al Qaeda and mass-murder endangerments to us from Iraq itself, all of which literally did not exist. In polls now six of 10 Americans do not believe the president is honest. Yet he has three more years of dictatorial control over our nuclear and other arms and our Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps and seems now to be maneuvering to use that control to wage another aggressive war on Iran, with literally incalculable consequences.

We Texans are a major source of this deterioration into crisis. The leading Democrats of the state so dishonored the liberal traditions of their party that in the resulting political vacuum, Bush was elected Governor here, and from Austin he mounted the campaign that a 5-4 majority of the U.S. Supreme Court illegally decreed made him President. After that, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, from Sugar Land, crafted his scheme to use corporate money to widen the Republicans' majority in the Texas delegation to Washington, D.C., battening down right-wing GOP control of the House and the Congress. The third President from Texas and his Republican Congress then waged aggressive war on Iraq, drove the nation into insolvency to further enrich the already rich, and just for good measure tore up the Constitution.

As we in Texas bear guilt for this we have also begun to join the resistance and revolt against it, starting with Cindy Sheehan's brigades in Crawford. By happy accident the Texas trip-root that now threatens to help bring the Bush presidency crashing down, crushing itself under its own arrogance, hubris, and criminality, is a law against corporate money in Texas elections that was passed a century ago in the state's populist afterglow. To uphold that law, Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle has braved ruthless contumely, as he had done often before in order to prosecute public officials he believed had violated the laws. While it is merely seemly to await the outcome of the trial of DeLay and his co-defendants on the charges that they laundered corporate money through Washington to elect Republicans to the House from Texas, in a speech in September Earle declared what he believes his prosecution is all about. "Corporate money in politics" has become "the fight of our generation of Americans....It is our job?-our fight?-to rescue democracy from the money that has captured it," he said. "The issue that we're faced with is the role of large concentrations of money in democracy, whether it's individuals or corporations, the issue is the same."

Since 1994, although the polls show a majority of Texan citizens support progressive reforms such as adequate taxation for equal education for Texas schoolchildren, the leaders of the disappearing Texas Democratic Party and their statewide candidates, finking out on every ethically important political issue, have proved again and again that nothing fails like failure. Rot-gut Republicans have swept every statewide office and achieved mercenary domination of the Texas courts, too. In my opinion, Texas Democrats ought to have concluded by 2002 at the latest that they should be choosing, from among the waves of the on-comers, entirely new sets of state and local party leaders and candidates. For example, rather than be taken in, even a jot, by the torrent of contemptuous abuse directed at Ronnie Earle by Tom DeLay, his lawyers, and that ilk, Texans should be realizing that?-just as the dramatic prosecutions of Thomas E. Dewey in New York made him a Republican presidential candidate and now the populist prosecutions of Eliot Spitzer in New York State are making him a national figure?-Ronnie Earle has fully qualified himself as a front-rank leader in Texas politics. For another example, this year, in my opinion?-shared, by the way, by Jim Hightower?-Texans are very fortunate to have running for Attorney General the lifelong labor lawyer and Democratic firebrand David Van Os of San Antonio. The Observer does not make political endorsements, but I may say here for myself alone that David, in my carefully considered personal judgment, is the Ralph Yarborough of his generation.

The national resistance to Bush, Cheney, Rove, et al., is coming into focus, too. John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, which is the logical source for impeachment initiatives, has taken the significant step of calling for an investigation of Bush and Cheney with a view to censure, which obviously could metamorphose into impeachment. Tom Daschle, until recently the Minority Leader in the Senate, Sen. Edward Kennedy, and Nancy Pelosi, the House Minority Leader, are all calling for investigations of Bush and Cheney. Elizabeth Holtzman writes for impeachment in the current Nation, and the Internet is on fire with initiatives to impeach Bush and Cheney for crimes committed in office, foremost among them lying our nation into a war of aggression. Impeachment is unlikely as long as the House remains firmly in GOP control, but this year it would be gratifying to see citizens seeking the election of House candidates?-whether Democrats, Republicans, or independents?-who promise explicitly to vote, if elected, to impeach Bush and Cheney.

If impeachment does not become possible, let me broach with you the idea that a grand jury, federal or state, should indict Bush and Cheney for their manifold official crimes. Are we, as we are so often piously assured, "a nation of laws and not of men," or is the President above the law if his party controls the House and can block impeaching him?

The Constitution is silent on whether a seated President and Vice President can be indicted, while in office, for crimes committed while they have held those offices. Constitutional lawyers are congenitally prone to announcing that this cannot be done because it would disrupt the ongoing business of the government. But it is time to do it, if necessary absent impeachment, for exactly that reason?-to disrupt the continuation of THIS government.

I have not yet found one constitutional lawyer who can cite a Supreme Court case or any other judicial precedent prohibiting their indictment?-if you know of one please let me hear from you. In 1973 Nixon's attorney general said the President can't be indicted, but why should Nixon's attorney general bind us?

Committed to nonviolence, determined, in this post-Gandhi era, against violence, nevertheless we are once again in the position of the Framers of the Constitution. In the post-revolutionary emergency, the Founding Fathers took things in their own hands, violating their clear instructions from the states by proposing to create the United States, which the states then created. In the crisis we are in now we must not be misled by expostulating lawyers or posturing politicians. We the citizens can make up our own minds whether we can indict Bush and Cheney and, if they are convicted, throw them out.

May we close here, then, as we began two centuries and more ago, with the words of Tom Paine. "We have it in our power to begin the world over again," he said. "The birth day of a new world is at hand… We are a people upon experiments. It is an age of revolutions, in which everything may be looked for."

Ronnie Dugger is the founding editor and former publisher of The Texas Observer. Author of presidential biographies and other books and articles, he writes now from his office in Cambridge, Mass.

© 2006 Texas Observer

It isn't just a matter of constitutional empowerment; it's a matter of violating standing laws.

Yaknow what never should have happened? The president never should have signed FISA into law way back in the day. Because once that happened, FISA became a legal boundary on the Executive Branch which the Executive Branch agreed to. Thus, it is sitting and standing law, and the president most certainly can not decide to break it because he/they feel the executive branch 'should' have more power. Or, more accurately, he/they can; but they cannot expect to avoid the consequences of their actions.

We have ways of changing the rules; constitutional conventions, laws passed by congress. There are also Executive orders; as was pointed out earlier, they allow the president to take action; but not to avoid the consequences of that action.

There are two consequences; political and legal. The president may dodge the legal consequences, but given the problems with the issue - the president directly lied about wiretaps in 2004, the Justice dept' attempted to get the laws changed in 2002 and 2003(implying that they knew it was illegal), and there were undoubtedly some people listened in on who probably shouldn't have been - the political consequences could be dire, if not for Bush himself, then for the '06 Congress.

Cycloptichorn

The esteemed Finn D'Abuzz wrote:

Perhaps I thought his knowledge of the history and operation of the US Constitution to be incomplete. Perhaps I was right.

Where to begin, oh, The governing concept is that the Judiciary is the absolute arbiter of all issues in dispute. That's why we call them Judges. They settle issues in dispute. Think Gore v. Bush. If they overturn a law or set of laws, Congress can go back and rewrite, but the Courts decide if the law as written or re-written is Constitutional. Congress, for example, and I apologize if this is knuckleheaded, but it has been proposed, cannot pass a law saying that the Court has no jurisdiction over it.

Mr. D'Abuzz apparently is so young to have missed the insertion of the XXVII Amendment to the Constitution in 1992. (Twenty seventh for those who cannot read Roman Numerals)
I am so old as to have been around for Amendments XXII through XXVII and was engaged in the failed efforts to pass two others, the Equal Rights Amendment and the Amendment to give the Dist. of Columbia representation in the US House of Representatives. How the second one failed to pass is still beyond me.

Here's a link to your Constitutional Amendments,:"Knucklehead Knowledge for the People"

Oh and by the by, you are wrong about this as well:
The current administration believes the Congress is a mere inconvenience to their execution of power. They are wrong. They are Nixonian in that, he who once stated that "if a President does something, it's not illegal." I would love to see George W. Bush making a sad, yet brave, wave goodbye from the top steps of his departing helicopter.

Joe(with Dick Cheney already seated inside the craft)Nation

In what way am I imposing a standard beyond what the constitution calls for? If any branch tries to overplay its role it is a problem for the country. Since all branches do it, it is the responsibility of the people to say when it is too much. Your argument seems to be we should ignore those times.

When the President ignores existing law, it IS one of those times. You might think he has the right to do it but that doesn't change facts. The law exists. The President didn't follow it. We may interpret the law a little differently but it is no different than when Clinton didn't tell the whole truth. Some interpreted perjury laws as not telling the truth was a violation. There is certainly room for interpretation in the case of FISA too. But there can be little question of Bush following the law to the letter. Even Tico's argument is that the law is unconstitutional rather than arguing that Bush followed it.

Is your standard that the President is free to ignore laws?

ACLU Releases Government Photos
ACLU Releases Government Photos
WXIA TV, Atlanta
Friday 27 January 2006

A government photo shows Caitlin Childs protesting.
(Photo: WXIA 11Alive.com)

The ACLU of Georgia released copies of government files on Wednesday that illustrate the extent to which the FBI, the DeKalb County Division of Homeland Security and other government agencies have gone to compile information on Georgians suspected of being threats simply for expressing controversial opinions.

Two documents relating to anti-war and anti-government protests, and a vegan rally, prove the agencies have been "spying" on Georgia residents unconstitutionally, the ACLU said.

For example, more than two dozen government surveillance photographs show 22-year-old Caitlin Childs of Atlanta, a strict vegetarian, and other vegans picketing against meat eating, in December 2003. They staged their protest outside a HoneyBaked Ham store on Buford Highway in DeKalb County.

An undercover DeKalb County Homeland Security detective was assigned to conduct surveillance of the protest and the protestors, and take the photographs. The detective arrested Childs and another protester after he saw Childs approach him and write down, on a piece of paper, the license plate number of his unmarked government car.

"They told me if I didn't give over the piece of paper I would go to jail and I refused and I went to jail, and the piece of paper was taken away from me at the jail and the officer who transferred me said that was why I was arrested," Childs said on Wednesday.

The government file lists anti-war protesters in Atlanta as threats, the ACLU said. The ACLU of Georgia accuses the Bush administration of labeling those who disagree with its policy as disloyal Americans.

"We believe that spying on American citizens for no good reason is fundamentally un-American, that it's not the place of the government or the best use of resources to spy on its own citizens and we want it to stop. We want the spies in our government to pack their bags, close up their notebooks, take their cameras home and not engage in the spying anymore," Gerald Weber of the ACLU of Georgia said during a news conference.

"We have heard of not a single, government surveillance of a pro-war group," Weber said. "And I doubt we will ever hear of a single surveillance of a pro-war group."


Caitlin Childs, shown at an ACLU news conference.
(Photo: WXIA 11Alive.com)

The ACLU wants Congress and the courts to order government agencies, including the FBI, to stop unconstitutional surveillance.

Weber said the ACLU of Georgia may sue the government, in order to define, once and for all, what unconstitutional surveillance is in a post-911 America.

The FBI in Atlanta declined to comment. According to the Associated Press, FBI spokesman Bill Carter in Washington, D.C. said that all FBI investigations are conducted in response to information that the people being investigated were involved in or might have information about crimes.

As for Caitlin Childs' protest against meat eating, the files obtained by the ACLU include the DeKalb County Homeland Security report on the surveillance of Childs and the others. The detective wrote that he ordered Childs to give him the piece of paper on which she had written his license tag number, telling her that he did not want her or anyone else to have the tag number of his undercover vehicle.

The detective did not comment in his report about why his license tag number was already visible to the public.

The detective wrote that Childs was "hostile, uncooperative and boisterous toward the officers."

Childs said today that the agents shouldn't have been there in the first place, squelching legal dissent.

"We have the right to gather and protest and speak out."

Not in Bush's fascist nation of America you don't

Instead of fighting to promote democracy throughout the world. We need to be fighting to preserve ours.

Really? Which form of protest has been stamped out? Which rallies have been broken up?

Try to do a little research on the police activities at the most recent Republican Convention in New York City. Hundreds were arrested without cause, lured into police traps and duped by police agents dressed as protesters. Even people who just wanted to stand on a street corner in silence without signs


Videos expose police actions
Seven months after the mass arrests of over 1,800 protesters at the Republican Convention in New York City last summer, 91 percent of the nearly 1,700 cases that have been concluded have resulted in acquittals or the dismissal of charges. Four hundred cases were dismissed after video recordings made by volunteer observers and others showed that there was no reason for the arrests, the New York Times reported last week. Some of the videos also exposed false testimony by the police.

In the case of Dennis Kyne, arrested on the steps of the New York Public Library last August, police officer Matthew Wohl testified at trial last December that "we picked him up and we carried him while he squirmed and screamed. I had one of his legs because he was kicking and refusing to walk on his own."

Wohl's colorful description was apparently made up. Kyne's attorney showed the court a videotape showing his client walking down the steps of the library, not being carried and not kicking. The tape in addition showed that Wohl, who also signed complaints against four other protesters arrested at the time, was not present during any of the arrests. The charges against Kyne were immediately dropped. Four months later, the Manhattan District Attorney's office now says it is reviewing Wohl's account, but the cop is not expected to face any penalty for his false testimony, which in all likelihood is part of the police department's modus operandi in cases of mass arrests.

In another case, which took far longer to reach a conclusion, Alexander Dunlop was arrested on Second Avenue and charged with resisting arrest. Dunlop said he was not even a participant in the protest, but was seized by the police as part of a tactic of clearing the streets and intimidating demonstrators. Only recently did Dunlop discover that the official police videotape, which was to be introduced as evidence against him, had been edited to remove images that showed he never resisted arrest. A volunteer found a more complete version of the tape, and prosecutors agreed earlier this month to drop the charges, claiming improbably that a technician had accidentally cut just those parts of the tape that exonerated the defendant.

These two cases are only the most prominent among many. New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) president Donna Lieberman said that videotape evidence had led to the dropping of charges against 227 people arrested at an August 31 demonstration at the World Trade Center site. "The camera is a powerful tool that has enabled us not just to exonerate individuals, but hold police accountable and document serious wrongdoings," said Lieberman. Much of the video was assembled by I-Witness Video, a project that coordinated filming by hundreds of volunteers and worked with the National Lawyers Guild to reveal what actually took place during the arrests.



Joe(take off the blinders)Nation

Thanks for the great post, Joe.

Don't think McGentrix wants to take off the blinders. Might be too scary.

au, you are also correct. Democracy is crumbling in America fast.

Let's see what kind of possible rebuttal McGentrix will come up with to dispute Joe's post.

Any time spent explaining anything to McG is lost moments!

Anon

Agreed. When one is bent on seeing only one viewpoint, it is tedious and senseless to debate.

However, when you're presented with overwhelming proof that contradicts your previously held views, then you must concede. If you're intelligent enough.

I would think he would have the decency to admit defeat at the hands of Joe Nation.

Isn't that what debate is all about?

Not as many as should be. Here's when your 'democracy' turned into a 'kleptocracy'. Remember those heady days as the Repubs endorsed the 'vigourous' side of polling??

source

Democracy in action, Bush Crime Family style.