Last week, something incredible happened in the U.S. House of Representatives: a bipartisan coalition formed around an important issue. That’s how Congress has conducted business during most of its 224-year history, but we all know that hasn’t been the case in quite some time. Yet last week, an uncommon alliance of Tea Partiers and liberal civil libertarians banded together to block the National Security Agency’s phone data collection program. To nearly everyone’s surprise, the amendment to a defense bill intended to restrict the NSA’s ability to spy on Americans not suspected of terrorist activity nearly passed.
The vote was 217-205 against the amendment — introduced by GOP Rep. Justin Amash and Democrat Rep. John Conyers, both of Michigan — with 94 Republicans joining 111 Democrats. Remarkably, more Republicans voted for the Obama administration’s position against the amendment than did Democrats. Apparently, the power of the NSA invoking the “national security” boogeyman is great enough to override a majority of GOP House members’ contempt for Obama. In the same way, civil libertarians on both the left and the right are so resistant to an expanding national security state, they put aside their mutual suspicions and worked to protect Americans’ privacy.
It’s about time. It’s no secret that the hard right and hard left share a passion for civil liberties; the only surprising thing about last week’s coalition is that it took so long to develop. Here’s hoping defenders of civil liberties from both sides of the political equation will continue to communicate and build a reliable coalition dedicated to stopping government abuses of citizens’ rights — an ominous trend that acquired legitimacy under Bush’s Patriot Act, and has been continued, if not expanded, under President Constitutional Lawyer. Such a coalition is more needed than ever; hopefully it’s readying itself for another assault on the NSA’s out-of-control Big Brotherism. It is imperative that the collecting of phone records of nearly every U.S. citizen and resident be stopped.
Why? For starters, using its supposed authority to do absolutely anything to head off terrorist plots, the NSA strong-armed U.S. telecommunications companies like AT&T, Verizon and Sprint to turn over the “meta-data” (who called whom, when, for how long, etc.) for Every. Damned. Call. made by Every. Single. American, “on an ongoing daily basis.” Note that they don’t just want calls made by suspected terrorists or known foreign spies or even run-of-the-mill hoodlums. The NSA wants (and has) everything.
Secondly, America has a little something called the Fourth Amendment, which protects all of us from unreasonable search and seizure. It’s pretty hard to believe that the writers of the Constitution would have been OK with the government seizing and searching through all the available information about U.S. citizens, be it the personal papers of the past or today’s phone calls and Internet activity. The NSA says its snooping is constitutional because it stores the phone records in some sort of lockbox and looks at them only when it needs to. Well, that’s great, but the Fourth Amendment doesn’t say anything about banning unreasonable searches and seizures “except when the government needs to see something.” More to the point, just because the current administration isn’t using NSA-culled information to attack political enemies — or worse — doesn’t mean that some future administration wouldn’t do it. In fact, it’s reasonable to assume that a future neo-Nixon or -Cheney wouldn’t be stopped by something as silly as their predecessors’ rules.
Thirdly, what’s next? Everyone knows that once governments get accustomed to a new type of power, they tend to try to expand it. Who’s to say President Neo-Nixon wouldn’t want everyone’s emails, or the contents of everyone’s hard drive? Or maybe microphones placed in everyone’s home, or cameras in everyone’s bedrooms? Yes, those sound highly unlikely, but just a few years ago so was the idea that the government would collect all of our phone records.
The NSA says that doing away with its phone-records collection would “endanger national security.” That’s ludicrous, and for one simple reason: Islamic terrorism, i.e., the reason for the NSA’s phone-data collection, is not a mortal threat to the existence of the United States. As I wrote a few weeks ago, terrorism is simply not a good enough reason to justify violating the privacy rights of 300 million Americans. Plus, here’s what it boils down to: This is the United States. We are ostensibly a free country. It’s the main thing we’re known for worldwide; that freedom isn’t merely a part of our national identity. To a large degree, it is our national identity. If the U.S. government can’t find terrorists without changing the very nature of our nation — as in, “it’s a free country” — that’s just too damned bad.
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This article appears in Jul 31 – Aug 6, 2013.
“Neo-Nixon”? Nixon bugged one office and had to resign. Obama bugs the entire world and gets a Nobel Prize.
Once again Grooms’s blind allegiance to Black Jesus (he leaves out that the Democrat-controlled Senate won’t even let the Amash amendment come to the floor’ and that BJ would certainly veto it) overrides all objectivity.
Garth:
Where in that article did you see anything that blames the Republicans for all the spying?
He used as an example of the risk, a former president who spied on political enemies.
You are so consumed by hatred for President Obama that it just oozes into everything you post.
Thanks for the comments. I have to agree, DLP, that Garth’s comment is utterly weird, especially since I commented negatively on Obama’s continuation of Bush’s NSA policy. Maybe he doesn’t realize that Obama is a Constitutional lawyer and thus missed the point?
And as for the hope that libertarians and left-liberal civil libertarians will be able to continue their coalition? Not a word of comment from ol’ Garth. Not that it’s surprising. Here’s the thing: Garth and many others like him don’t really engage in discourse, they just look for something they recognize, in their Fox-induced fog, as ‘lib-bul,’ and blast off an angry comment about it. The really sad thing, in terms of encouraging a better level of public discourse, is that the know-nothing element that Garth represents has largely driven away commenters — on all but the most tightly monitored sites — who are interested in intelligent, back and forth dialogue, but aren’t interested in having their every sentence parsed by rightwing nuts for evidence of “socialism” (or whatever other irrelevant catchword pops into their heads). Garth & Co. are kind of like Pavlov’s dogs, salivating when the “lib-bul” bell rings in their degraded psyches. Anyhow, just my additional 2 cents.
As far as I can see the Liberal Media is just honky dory with Obama’s domestic syoing program. Time, MSNBC, CNN, Creative Loafing, ABC, NBC, CBS, the New York Times were at best tepid for about a day. After that nothing.
PS: I don’t remember the word bipartisanism because the correct word is bipartisanship. John Grooms: supergenius!
Oops, just checked back in on this thread, only to find that Garth doesn’t like the word bipartisanism. It isn’t the word I would have used if I’d written that sub-headline, but it IS a legitimate word. In fact, it’s in at least three different dictionaries, including a reference from Webster, and it means the exact same thing as bipartisanship. Mr. Vader, it’s always a good idea to actually know what you’re talking about before you try to mock someone else publicly. Just sayin’.