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Saturday, March 25, 2006

Glenn Greenwald on the Administration's power grab
Posted by Jill | 9:18 AM

It amazes me that the President of the United States has come out and said point-blank that he doesn't have to obey any laws he doesn't agree with -- and Congress doesn't care, the media doesn't care, Americans don't care.

Glenn Greenwald explains exactly what Bush did:

The Republicans and Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee submitted detailed questions to the Bush Administration regarding the NSA program, and the DoJ's responses to both the Democrats' questions and its responses to the Republicans' are now available.

There are numerous noteworthy items, but the most significant, by far, is that the DoJ made clear to Congress that even if Congress passes some sort of newly amended FISA of the type which Sen. DeWine introduced, and even if the President "agrees" to it and signs it into law, the President still has the power to violate that law if he wants to. Put another way, the Administration is telling the Congress -- again -- that they can go and pass all the laws they want which purport to liberalize or restrict the President's powers, and it does not matter, because the President has and intends to preserve the power to do whatever he wants regardless of what those laws provide.

[snip]

The reality is that the Administration has been making clear for quite some time that they have unlimited power and that nothing -- not even the law -- can restrict it. But here, they are specifically telling Congress that even if Congress amends FISA and the President agrees to abide by those amendments, they still have the power to break the law whenever they want. As I have documented more times than I can count, we have a President who has seized unlimited power, including the power to break the law, and the Administration -- somewhat commendably -- is quite candid and straightforward about that fact.

I believe that even people who are aware of these facts have not really ingested or accepted the reality that we have an Administration that has embraced this ideology of lawlessness. Yesterday, I received numerous e-mails from people asking why I had not written about this report from the Boston Globe, which reported:

When President Bush signed the reauthorization of the USA Patriot Act this month, he included an addendum saying that he did not feel obliged to obey requirements that he inform Congress about how the FBI was using the act's expanded police powers.


The reason I didn't was because, as extraordinary as this signing statement is in one sense, it really reveals nothing new. We really do have an Administration which believes it has the power to break all laws relating, however broadly, to defending the country. It has said this repeatedly in numerous contexts and acted on those beliefs by breaking the law -- repeatedly and deliberately. They are still breaking the law by, for instance, continuing to eavesdrop on Americans without the warrants required by FISA.

This is not theory. The Administration is not saying these things as a joke. We really do live in a country where we have a President who has seized the unlimited power to break the law. That's not hyperbole in any way. It is reality. And the Patriot Act signing statement only re-iterates that fact.

[snip]

Put another way, the Administration has seized the power of Congress to make the laws, they have seized the power of the judiciary to interpret the laws, and they execute them as well. They have consolidated within themselves all of the powers of the government, particularly with regard to national security.


You know, the next big secular holiday in this country is Memorial Day. For most of us, that means the day we officially fire up the grill, open up the pool, listen to a baseball game, take a day off and enjoy the unofficial beginning of summer. But even if we don't do it most years, this year I think we all ought to attend a Memorial Day parade and buy the poppies -- not as a jingoistic celebration of some Riefenstahl-esque ritual of American chest-beating, but to remind ourselves of particularly the men who died in WWII fighting the fascism of Germany and Italy. Those men, perhaps more than in any other war, died to defend freedom against power-mad dictators who believed themselves to be larger than any state or any country. I don't think any of the young American men who died in Europe or Japan from 1941-1945 died so that an underachieving cokehead could be appointed president by a partisan Supreme Court, seize a re-election by smearing a decorated war veteran and keeping black people out of the polls in Ohio, cynically use an attack on American shores to lie us into a war to enrich his family and friends, and then unilaterally claim he has dictatorial powers and that the Constitution is null and void.

The next secular holiday after that is Flag Day -- June 14. If you have children, they will be drawing flags in school that day. When they bring home their flag drawings and flag stickers, think for a moment about what that flag means -- and then think about the aforementioned president deciding that our entire system of government as set forth by the Founding Fathers who originated that flag is no longer applicable -- because he says so.

Is that the America we now live in? And are we going to put up with it?
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