The GOP appears to be on the verge of adopted an elected King as their official position. Glenn Greenwald lays out the details, but, in essence, many members of the GOP Senate caucus are prepared to create a bill that allows the President to eavesdrop on anyone, anywhere, at anytime on his own say so without prior approval or any real oversight. The bill does state that the President must report to a sub committee, but that sub committee does not have the power to end the program, and it is legally prohibited from telling anyone about what it knows. In fact, the bill makes it illegal for anyone to tell anyone else about any aspect of the program. The American people have no right to know what their government is doing, apparently.

This is the end of the road for the GOP’s belief in our Constitution. When faced with a President who claimed that he had the right to break the law, they not only voted against holding investigations into that President, they now want to, at least partially, confirm that notion. This law destroys the Fourth Amendment and explicitly states that no one — not the courts, not Congress — can have any say in or exercise any control over the Executive when it comes to matters of wiretapping. I see no reason why, if this passes, the GOP Senate would not do something similar each and every time that the President claims the authority to do as he wishes. The moderates in the GOP will not stop them — this bill is sponsored by Snowe, Graham, and Hagel. Even the moderates, it seems, have adopted the President as King theory.

So this is where we are: on matters of national security, the Republican in the White House claims that his actions are above the law and even, perhaps, some aspects of the Constitution such as the Bill of Rights; the Republican controlled Senate refused to investigate the illegal activities of the President; Republicans in the Senate, including three generally considered moderates, are on the verge of ratifying the President’s illegal activities and, indirectly, his wide-ranging notion of Executive power. The GOP has already gone very far down the road to an elected King. If they pass this law they will be telling the entire world that they think the Constitutional experiment has failed. They will have driven a dagger into the back of the system of checks and balances that survived foreign invasion, a civil war, two world wars and the cold war and all manner of social upheaval.

They will have created a surveillance state run entirely out of the Oval Office, and they will have done so because they are more scared of Osama Bin Laden than they were of the Soviets, the Nazis, and the KKK. Democracies die because their people are too afraid to keep them alive.