| Constitution Doesn't Grant Courts War Powers |
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January 25, 2006 |
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BEGIN TRANSCRIPT |
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RUSH: Senator Kennedy, among other things, said that a justice "must have the courage and the wisdom to speak truth to power, to tell even the president that he's gone too far. We have a president who claims he has the authority to spy on Americans without the court order required by law." That, again, is just a repetition of the contemptible lie that the Democrats in the media are trying to spread. I mentioned this yesterday: the Foreign Intelligence Services Act, the FISA Court, this is about FOREIGN intelligence. This is not a DOMESTIC spying program. (Bill Clinton did that. It was called Echelon.) Kennedy goes on to say that the record "demonstrates we cannot count on Judge Alito to blow the whistle when the president is out of bounds." It raises a larger question. In all of this, NSA spying scandal, what are we getting? We're getting questions about hearings.
 Arlen Specter wants to do hearings, look into what kind of powers the president has, and all these other members of Congress and the Senate demanding the same thing, along with the media. The real question about this is this: Where does Congress get off demanding a role in this process? What part of the Constitution authorizes Congress to substitute its policies on the battlefield for those of the commander-in-chief? Where does the Constitution say that any member of Congress, or Congress in toto, is a co-participant in the role of commander-in-chief? Why is it assumed that Congress gets to make these decisions, when in fact they don't? Now, there are things they can do. They can cut funding. They can de-authorize the war that way, but I don't see any of them raising that idea. I don't see any of them suggesting that we need to do that, but they cannot micromanage a war.
They have the power to regulate the military. That means they can determine pay scales and pensions; they can pay for or not pay for troop levels. They can authorize certain types of medals and uniforms and all that kind of thing. But Congress has never had war-making authority. They can declare war or not declare war, but with the War Powers Act we can go to war without them if we want. Furthermore, what part of the Constitution grants authority to any judge? He keeps talking about Alito won't be a whistleblower. Alito won't "blow the whistle" on George Bush, as he tramples all over our fingernails and our safe-deposit box boxes, and whatever else Bush is doing. What part of the Constitution -- I'm serious about this, folks -- grants authority to any judge or any court to second-guess military decisions made by the commander-in-chief?
We have all this talk going on about the president needing judicial authority to order intercepts. We don't have a word about the constitutional justification for that. As I have been trying to drill home the past couple of days, this has nothing to do, this whole NSA spy scandal has nothing to do with probable cause. It has nothing to do with search warrants. We are talking about something that's actually quite simple, conceptually, and that is intercepting enemy communications during a war. We're not chasing down car thefts, we're not chasing down bank robbers, and we're not chasing down rapists, because in Vermont they only get 60 days anyway, so what's the point? The idea that the president has the power to blow up cities during war without seeking approval from Congress or a judge or secret court before making the battlefield decision has that power, but he doesn't have the authority to determine and learn the enemy's whereabouts or next steps through intelligence-gathering? |
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We don't question his authority to order bomb strikes. We don't question his authority to order certain military maneuvers. But now all of a sudden we question his authority to determine and learn the enemy's whereabouts or next steps through intelligence-gathering? The two don't connect. It's incongruent. The question is asked, "Who will check the president's power?" The answer to that is something I already mentioned: Congress has the power to cut off funding if it wants -- and that's a pretty big check if you ask me. I mean, if they really don't like what the president is doing, kill it. Kill the money for it. They can do that, and he can of course not sign it and they can override the veto but they can do that and I don't hear any of them suggesting that. Apart from that, though, the president has the final say as commander-in-chief, just as Congress has the final say on appropriations.
You know, the president doesn't get to walk up to Congress and sit down and say, "You know what? I'm going to investigate you guys. You guys aren't doing what I want you to do." He can't. All he can do is propose a budget, but if you've noticed -- if you've been paying attention all your adult life you know that the final budget is authorized by Congress. All of the spending, all of the so-called cuts that never are, they all come from Congress. The president has no authority. He sends his budget up, and of course Congress routinely says what? "It's dead on arrival." So when the president says, "You guys are dead on arrival when you're trying to interrupt me, I'm the commander-in-chief" everybody says, "Well, we're going to check the president." They claim that Bush is nothing more than an "imperial presidency." You want an imperial presidency, how about Franklin Delano Roosevelt?
 We were talking about him packing the court yesterday. He wasn't just packing the court with as many Democrats as he could get. He wanted to add, what, six more? What was the Supreme Court at the time, nine? He wanted to add. He wanted a total of 15 justices on the court. He wanted to get up, add five or six. That's packing the court. FDR. You talk about violating civil rights? How about the internment of the Japanese? The Japanese-Americans during World War II? Lincoln and getting rid of habeas corpus. I mean, George W. Bush has interceded the least when it comes to all of these kinds of things and yet they're out there trying to cast him as this imperial president. The bottom line is Congress has no authority to oversee or to second-guess or to even participate in commander-in-chief duties. Now, unlike federal judges, the president -- and neither do judges, by the way.
The judges are not even trained. Judges don't even get the intelligence. Judges don't even get the war plan. Judges are not even involved in any aspect of it. Why in the world would Kennedy or anybody think that a judge should have some role in the conduct of a war and have a co-participant role in the constitutional powers vested in the commander-in-chief? It's absurd. All of this is absurd. Now, the president's term is limited. Federal judges are not. And unlike federal judges, the president must stand for election. So the real imperial threat would be rearranging the Constitution in such a way as empowering unaccountable, unelected, lifetime appointed judges to make these decisions, and that's what Ted Kennedy and his ilk are attempting to do here. |
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They don't like the Constitution the way it's written and they've been showing us evidence of that for as long as I've been paying attention as an adult. You want to talk about a real imperial presidency or a real imperial authority, you let a bunch of unelected, unaccountable judges start playing a role in commander-in-chief duties, and we're going to be in a huge mess, and that's when your liberal friends and your liberal Democrat Party politicians seek to do here with all of this talk about who's going to be the balance of the president? You are, if you've got the guts, Senator Kennedy. Just introduce the legislation defunding the war, defunding FISA, introduce legislation and go out and convince a bunch of people to vote for it to cut off all of the money for these operations. Short of that, shut up.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: One last point, folks, on all of this, this nattering from the Democrats that there must be some check on the president as we're in the middle of a war -- and Judge Alito will not be the one to "blow the whistle," Senator Kennedy fears. Have you noticed it is the same liberals and the same media types who accuse anyone who actually believes in the written Constitution of being some sort of extremist? That's what they did to Bork. "Can you believe what's in the Constitution? Why, what a backward Neanderthal you are! Why, that's a living, breathing document that should bend and shape and form and flake to accommodate the modern evolution of society." Of course, they love the living, breathing Constitution.
But you notice the same people -- the same people who chastise those of us who believe in the written Constitution -- are now waving the Constitution around as if it supports their position that the president lacks the power to secure intelligence on the enemy? The same people, the same people who find a privacy right to support abortion on demand somehow can't find the precise language in the Constitution that does in fact empower the president as commander-in-chief to make these wartime decisions. Nothing changes. They look at the Second Amendment, it's not there. "If the Founders knew what this country was going to become, why, they never would have put the Second Amendment in there. So we can throw it out." Oh, you mean you want to go to original intent? "No, no, no, we don't want to go to original intent. We're not saying that at all."
So you've got the living, breathing Constitution. So the way the liberals read it, if it's in there, it isn't, and if it's not in there, it is. Now, this is not a group of people that's building a solid foundation on which to grow and inspire a political movement or political party. You are witnessing an implosion, and I'll tell you the number one characteristic or human trait that is causing all this to happen, aside from the fact that they're just dead wrong is arrogance. Arrogance gets in the way of so much, gets in the way of you understanding who you really are and accepting the truth about things, enabling you to see reality. Arrogance is the thing that allows you to pretend you live in your dreams, that you somehow are God's gift to everybody, and they aren't, and never have been.
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Read the Background Material... |
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Headline: Black Hat Democrats
Source: American Spectator
By: Patrick Hynes
Date: January 25, 2006
With the 2006 elections ten months away Karl Rove pulled back the curtain on some key GOP campaign themes recently. Hidden amongst the themes of the Democrats' "pre-9/11 worldview" and tax cuts was his statement that Democrat Senators looked "mean spirited and small minded" during the Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearings of Judge Sam Alito. After decades of allowing themselves to be branded the bullies of American politics, might Republicans now have an opportunity to turn the tables on their liberal adversaries, both in the other party and in the media?
It seems as though no matter how crazy the Democrats become, Republicans always wear the black hats. Even after countless "Bush is Hitler" parades in Washington, almost $300 million in liberal 527 negative advertising, and a phony memo scandal that almost brought down a whole network, the big story out of the 2004 election remains those nasty Swift Boat Veterans who "slandered" poor John Kerry, who simply was merely "reporting for duty."
Of course, being mean and nasty isn't necessarily a negative trait for a politician to have, given that lunatic Islamist terrorists are trying to kill us. But that point notwithstanding, I do believe it is time the Democrats start wearing the black hats in the popular caricature of our nation's political drama.
That Ted Kennedy, Pat Leahy, Chuck Schumer, and the rest of the Democrats on the Judiciary Committee made fools of themselves regarding the Alito nomination is axiomatic. Their race-baiting berating of Judge Alito brought his wife to tears and caused her to walk away from the committee room in dismay and disgust.
Left-wing "activists" have launched an organized campaign to "graffiti-ize the covers" of popular new conservative books such as Kate O'Beirne's Women Who Make the World Worse and Fred Barnes's Rebel-in-Chief. For example, one subversive Photoshop expert replaced the title of Barnes's book with "Felon-in-Chief." Hardy-Har-har.
Even worse were some of the online "reviews." Here's one:
American hero? Fearless leader? Naaaah. More like: Torturer. Liar. War Criminal. Dry Drunk. Immoral Christian. English-language Incompetent. Loser Businessman. Mediocre Human. Apocolypse Pox on American Politics. Bad book about a worse person. May both disappear from the face of the earth.
Bravo. It would be easy to blow this fringe lunacy off if it wasn't, more or less, the official Democrat Party line about our president.
And don't forget Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell's reaction to left-wing reader "feedback" to her columns about Jack Abramoff:
Nothing in my 50-year career prepared me for the thousands of flaming e-mails I got last week over my last column, e-mails so abusive and many so obscene that part of The Post's Web site was shut down.
Yes, we are dealing with a very nasty group here. But the Alito smears and the tasteless web chatter are small chips when we hold them up against liberal public policies. It is there that the liberals demonstrate just how mean and callous they really are.
CONSIDER THE SUBJECT OF EMBRYONIC stem cell research. In recent years, America's insurgents have assailed President Bush and Republicans for being "against science" because the administration's official policy holds that the United States should not use taxpayer dollars to finance the cloning and killing of human embryos for the purposes of conducting scientific experiments. It really shouldn't be that controversial a public policy. Just replace "embryos" with "people" and I imagine you'd approach something near unanimous consent in favor of discontinuing any such program.
But the radicals have been filling the hearts of the aged and infirm with false hope about "the promise" of embryonic stem cell research. As 2004 Democratic Vice Presidential nominee John Edwards argued at a campaign stop:
We will do stem cell research. We will stop juvenile diabetes, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and other debilitating diseases. America just lost a great champion for this cause in Christopher Reeve. People like Chris Reeve will get out of their wheelchairs and walk again with stem cell research.
Elsewhere, 58 U.S. Senators -- Republicans and Democrats alike -- urged President Bush in a letter to reverse his position on federal funding for clone-to-kill programs in part because the United States was in danger of falling behind South Korea in realizing the miracles of embryonic stem cell research. Didn't he know that this research "might hold the key" to curing 100 million Americans, including former President Ronald Reagan (if Bush hadn't already killed him, that is)?!
Alas, it was all a lie. The appropriately named South Korean scientist Hwang Woo-suk, upon whose shoulders all this "promise" rested, turned out to be as fraudulent as Mary Mapes's documents. He faked his cloned stem cell lines. And the enthusiasm for his work expressed by the "scientific community" has made a joke out of the concept of peer review.
Lest you think this is just some isolated hoax with no implications on the larger field of embryonic stem cell research, consider the words of one of Dr. Hwang's peers, Joseph Itskovitz: "The bottom line is that it's a major disaster to our whole field because the expectations were so high and now we are back to square one."
This is Jonas Salk faking the vaccination for polio. The hopes of 100 million Americans have been shattered because of the callousness of liberal promises.
AND LET'S NOT DISREGARD the looming (and increasingly inevitable) financial disaster that will strike when swarms of baby boomers storm the pay window to collect what they've been promised. The politicians in Washington and American interest groups spent the first half of 2005 debating the creeping crisis as it relates to Social Security and whether we can or should do anything about it. President Bush and some Republicans wanted to introduce personal retirement accounts. Democrats (sadly with the help of more than a few RINO's) demonized the plan. But what is most notable about the debate is that the Democrats' official position was that we had nothing to worry about. Don't be fooled by Republican tricks, they told Americans. Everything is going to be just fine.
This false sense of, ahem, security, over the years has resulted in millions of soon-to-be-on-the-dole Boomers making the disastrous decision to not put money away for themselves. And so now we have the most prosperous generation in human history prepared to retire without a penny to their names, fully convinced that the government checks are on their way; "guaranteed" in a "lock box," as the liberal parlance goes.
But what happens when the bill comes due? Ask the city fathers in Duluth, Minnesota. Since 1983, that city has promised lifetime health care for all retired municipal workers, their spouses and their children up to age 26. The result? Well, according to the New York Times:
No one really knew how much it would cost. Three years ago, the city decided to find out....The total came to about $178 million, or more than double the city's operating budget. And the bill was growing....For years, governments have been promising generous medical benefits to millions of schoolteachers, firefighters and other employees when they retire, yet experts say that virtually none of these governments have kept track of the mounting price tag.
Now, replace "Duluth, Minnesota" with "the United States" and "retired municipal employees" with "everyone" and you begin to see the sheer heartlessness of the liberals' empty promises. Many retiring Boomers will be turned away at the pay window. Still others will receive something much smaller than they were promised. And the rest of us are going to have to pay more in taxes.
There's liberal compassion for you.
If Karl Rove and the Republicans pursue this mean meme throughout 2006, I hope they extend it past trite anecdotes about liberal tomfoolery. They ought to make the point finally and convincingly that liberal policies break hearts and destroy lives.
Headline: Under Clinton, NY Times called surveillance "a necessity"
Source: American Thinker
Date: January 12, 2006
By: William Tate
The controversy following revelations that U.S. intelligence agencies have monitored suspected terrorist related communications since 9/11 reflects a severe case of selective amnesia by the New York Times and other media opponents of President Bush. They certainly didn’t show the same outrage when a much more invasive and indiscriminate domestic surveillance program came to light during the Clinton administration in the 1990’s. At that time, the Times called the surveillance “a necessity.”
“If you made a phone call today or sent an e-mail to a friend, there’s a good chance what you said or wrote was captured and screened by the country’s largest intelligence agency.” (Steve Kroft, CBS’ 60 Minutes)
Those words were aired on February 27, 2000 to describe the National Security Agency and an electronic surveillance program called Echelon whose mission, according to Kroft,
“is to eavesdrop on enemies of the state: foreign countries, terrorist groups and drug cartels. But in the process, Echelon’s computers capture virtually every electronic conversation around the world.”
Echelon was, or is (its existence has been under-reported in the American media), an electronic eavesdropping program conducted by the United States and a few select allies such as the United Kingdom.
Tellingly, the existence of the program was confirmed not by the New York Times or the Washington Post or by any other American media outlet – these were the Clinton years, after all, and the American media generally treats Democrat administrations far more gently than Republican administrations – but by an Australian government official in a statement made to an Australian television news show.
The Times actually defended the existence of Echelon when it reported on the program following the Australians’ revelations.
“Few dispute the necessity of a system like Echelon to apprehend foreign spies, drug traffickers and terrorists….”
And the Times article quoted an N.S.A. official in assuring readers
“...that all Agency activities are conducted in accordance with the highest constitutional, legal and ethical standards.”
Of course, that was on May 27, 1999 and Bill Clinton, not George W. Bush, was president.
Even so, the article did admit that
“...many are concerned that the system could be abused to collect economic and political information.”
Despite the Times’ reluctance to emphasize those concerns, one of the sources used in that same article, Patrick Poole, a lecturer in government and economics at Bannock Burn College in Franklin, Tenn., had already concluded in a study cited by the Times story that the program had been abused in both ways.
“ECHELON is also being used for purposes well outside its original mission. The regular discovery of domestic surveillance targeted at American civilians for reasons of ‘unpopular’ political affiliation or for no probable cause at all… What was once designed to target a select list of communist countries and terrorist states is now indiscriminately directed against virtually every citizen in the world,” Poole concluded.
The Times article also referenced a European Union report on Echelon. The report was conducted after E.U. members became concerned that their citizens’ rights may have been violated. One of the revelations of that study was that the N.S.A. used partner countries’ intelligence agencies to routinely circumvent legal restrictions against domestic spying.
“For example, [author Nicky] Hager has described how New Zealand officials were instructed to remove the names of identifiable UKUSA citizens or companies from their reports, inserting instead words such as ‘a Canadian citizen’ or ‘a US company’. British Comint [Communications intelligence] staff have described following similar procedures in respect of US citizens following the introduction of legislation to limit NSA’s domestic intelligence activities in 1978.”
Further, the E.U. report concluded that intelligence agencies did not feel particularly constrained by legal restrictions requiring search warrants.
“Comint agencies conduct broad international communications ‘trawling’ activities, and operate under general warrants. Such operations do not require or even suppose that the parties they intercept are criminals.”
The current controversy follows a Times report that, since 9/11, U.S. intelligence agencies are eavesdropping at any time on up to 500 people in the U.S. suspected of conducting international communications with terrorists. Under Echelon, the Clinton administration was spying on just about everyone.
“The US National Security Agency (NSA) has created a global spy system, codename ECHELON, which captures and analyzes virtually every phone call, fax, email and telex message sent anywhere in the world,”
Poole summarized in his study on the program.
According to an April, 2000 article in PC World magazine, experts who studied Echelon concluded that
“Project Echelon’s equipment can process 1 million message inputs every 30 minutes.”
In the February, 2000 60 Minutes story, former spy Mike Frost made clear that Echelon monitored practically every conversation – no matter how seemingly innocent – during the Clinton years.
“A lady had been to a school play the night before, and her son was in the school play and she thought he did a-a lousy job. Next morning, she was talking on the telephone to her friend, and she said to her friend something like this, ‘Oh, Danny really bombed last night,’ just like that. The computer spit that conversation out. The analyst that was looking at it was not too sure about what the conversation w-was referring to, so erring on the side of caution, he listed that lady and her phone number in the database as a possible terrorist.”
“This is not urban legend you’re talking about. This actually happened?” Kroft asked.
“Factual. Absolutely fact. No legend here.”
Even as the Times defended Echelon as “a necessity” in 1999, evidence already existed that electronic surveillance had previously been misused by the Clinton Administration for political purposes. Intelligence officials told Insight Magazine in 1997 that a 1993 conference of Asian and Pacific world leaders hosted by Clinton in Seattle had been spied on by U.S. intelligence agencies. Further, the magazine reported that information obtained by the spying had been passed on to big Democrat corporate donors to use against their competitors. The Insight story added that the mis-use of the surveillance for political reasons caused the intelligence sources to reveal the operation.
“The only reason it has come to light is because of concerns raised by high-level sources within federal law-enforcement and intelligence circles that the operation was compromised by politicians—includingmid- and senior-level White House aides—either on behalf of or in support of President Clinton and major donor-friends who helped him and the Democratic National Committee, or DNC, raise money.”
So, during the Clinton Administration, evidence existed (all of the information used in this article was available at the time) that:
-an invasive, extensive domestic eavesdropping program was aimed at every U.S. citizen;
-intelligence agencies were using allies to circumvent constitutional restrictions;
-and the administration was selling at least some secret intelligence for political donations.
These revelations were met by the New York Times and others in the mainstream media by the sound of one hand clapping. Now, reports that the Bush Administration approved electronic eavesdropping, strictly limited to international communications, of a relative handful of suspected terrorists have created a media frenzy in the Times and elsewhere.
The Times has historically been referred to as “the Grey Lady.” That grey is beginning to look just plain grimy, and many of us can no longer consider her a lady.
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