The Bush Administration apparently believed that the 4th amendment did not apply to military operations inside the country:
“Our office recently concluded that the Fourth Amendment had no application to domestic military operations,” the footnote states, referring to a document titled “Authority for Use of Military Force to Combat Terrorist Activities Within the United States.”
So, once again, the Bush Administration decided that they could ignore the Constitution as long as they took some minor, cosmetic step. Here is the Fourth Amendment:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
I don’t notice any qualification about which branch of the government people are supposed to be secure in their persons from. Again, the Bush Administration has chosen to steal powers from another branch of the government for the express purpose of making you less free. They hold democracy in contempt and seem to truly believe that they were elected as a Royal Court, able to do whatever struck their fancy. Defending them is simply not possible if one actually cares about things like liberty and democracy and personal freedom.
Someone should ask McCain exactly what he thinks of these memos. Let’s find out if his “National Greatness” means a monarch in the White House.
April 3rd, 2008
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Politics, Legal Issues |
3 comments
That is what the GOP thinks the President really is:
The Justice Department sent a legal memorandum to the Pentagon in 2003 asserting that federal laws prohibiting assault, maiming and other crimes did not apply to military interrogators who questioned al-Qaeda captives because the president’s ultimate authority as commander in chief overrode such statutes.
The notion that the President can ignore any law, break any treaty, abandon any restraint as long as he claims he is doing it in the name of national defense is repugnant to the conscience of any decent person and completely at odds with the foundational principles of democracy, liberty and our government. Defending this marks one as the most servile of men, so far gone in fear and hatred and the need for an illusionary father-figure to protect you from the dangers of the world as to render your opinion on how to handle anything more dangerous than a housefly meaningless. Alternately, I suppose you could just be a monster, a person who so revels in the notion of causing others pain that he would throw away three centuries of hard-earned wisdom about the nature of governments and power and freedom to ensure that he could go to bed a night assured that someone was being tortured on his his behalf somewhere.
And save your pixels if you wish to inform me that I am being mean or contemptuous. I am being mean and contemptuous. Contempt is the least of what is owed people who order such practices and people who defend such practices. One of the clearest lessons of history is that unchecked, unsupervised, unaccountable power is the death of individual liberty and personal freedom. Our Revolution was fought over the exercise of just such unchecked powers and our constitution was specifically designed to prevent anyone from accruing unchecked powers under any circumstances. But the Bush Administration and its disgusting little toadies like John Yoo are perfectly content to throw away all of that accumulated wisdom and the modern conservative movement is perfectly willing to defend them. Why, Dear God, am I supposed to treat this frontal assault on the core principles of democracy with respect?
These people have declared war on the very underpinnings of freedom and democracy. They have advocated a legal regime that would have made George III and Pinochet nod their heads in approval. They argue that a President can do anything he wants to anyone one he wants anywhere in the world he wants as long as he says the magic words “national security” first. They want to elevate the President to a kind of elected dictator and give him powers that would make a 17th century European Monarch giggle with glee. When I call these people servile, disgusting, and enemies of justice, morality, decency and democracy I am not insulting them. I am describing them.
April 2nd, 2008
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General, Politics, Legal Issues, Torture |
24 comments
Imagine a man on vacation, riding an ordinary bus on his way to the ordinary airport where and ordinary airplane is waiting to take him back to his ordinary life. Imagine that the bus tops, short of the ordinary airport, and this man is taken off the bus by an ordinary police officer. But the ordinary police officer has an extra-ordinary reason for taking the man: a cash bonus for every “terrorist” he turns in. Imagine the ordinary man riding, in chains, on a quite extraordinary airplane to a prison where he is kept outside, in the freezing cold and asked daily about things no ordinary man knows of. Where are the terrorists? What are their plans? Who do you know and what are you training to do?
Imagine that our ordinary friend is tortured on a regular basis, so that the torture becomes ordinary. Hung from his arms for days at a time. Beaten with his head underwater so that he is forced to inhale water. Electrocuted so that his body went numb. All to find out the extraordinary things our ordinary man does not and could never have known.
Imagine being sent to another prison, where the ordinary rules of justice and decency don’t apply. Imagine the very extraordinary notion of not being allowed to talk to a lawyer, of never being charged with a crime, of being beaten and deprived of sleep and human company on a regular basis. Imagine police forces — three of them — outside the walls of the prison doing the very ordinary investigations and coming to the unanimous conclusion that our ordinary man is, indeed, an ordinary man with no connection to terrorism at all. Imagine our ordinary man kept in that extraordinary prison, where they beat and freeze and mistreat him to find the answers to questions the police already know he cannot answer, for three and one half years after the police have made that determination. Imagine being let go only after the head of the man’s government personally asked for his release. Imagine the ordinary man being asked to sign a confession stating that he is, indeed, a terrorist as he is being escorted home.
When Kafka wrote about a man caught in a court system that would not tell him what he was imprisoned for an did not give him an opportunity to defend himself against the charges, they called him a surrealist and turned his name into an adjective to describe the peculiar horror he wrote about. Today, that horror is an every day part of the official policy of the government of the United States of America. The government, egged on by people who, in their fear or their racism or their innate viciousness, apologized for torture and threw away concepts like innocent until proven guilty and habeas corpus and independent oversight, abused its power. Imagine that.
March 31st, 2008
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Politics, Legal Issues, Torture |
4 comments
Publius has a post discussing theories of constitutional interpretation. This, of course, means that a fight (but since its Obsidian Wings, it’s a very genteel, intelligent fight) over original intnet and its imitators has broken out. My dislike original intent as an idea is pretty well documented, so I wont really go back over those details. But on thing did strike me reading the comments is just how much disregard for the words of the Constitution OI entails, at least when discussing the 2nd Amendment.
Let me preface this was saying the obvious: I am not a law professor or a legal scholar. I am taking the positions of the commentators in the OW thread as a reasonable approximation of how OI is understood in the everyday world. I may be doing the theory a disservice by doing so, but I still the discussion is worth having becasue, as I said, I don’t think it unreasonable to discuss the way the theory is understood even if that general understanding does not map precisely to the academic understanding of the theory.
The main thrust of Publius’ post is about how he thinks textual ambiguities should be handled with the 2nd Amendment as a good example of such ambiguity in the Constitution. This, of course, lead to a discussion about why or why not original intent is the best method of resolving such ambiguities. the argument is, in short, that looking at what the founders meant when they wrote the words was the best way to determine that the text in question should mean. Put aside for a moment whether or not that such an understanding is reasonably possible, and think about the implications of that position. The Founding Fathers were not, as a general rule, stupid men. But OI seems to assume that they were. the ambiguity in the Constitution is there becasue the Founding Fathers put it there, deliberately. Every inch of that document was haggled over and written and rewritten many times until langauea that could be accpeted by tthe country was hit upon. That language, that ambiguity, was put there on purpose. They could not come to a clear agreement, a clear understanding, so they wrote words that paper-overred the differences and they did so consciously.
OI proponents seems to be saying, “well, never mind that. let’s see what they really meant!” What they really meant is right there in the constitution: we could not come t a clear agreement on this, so here is the only compromise that would work. There very existence of textual ambiguity is, in many if not all cases, is a direct refutation of the prime notion behind original intent: the Founders did not have a clear positioned accepted by all of them and so any attempt to find such a position to settle questions of textual ambiguity is, by definition, flawed. The best you can do is something like “well a majority thought …” but that avoids the question. if the majority really thought X, then why is the text not written that way? All that version of OI is doing is refighting the same battles that picking which historical faction they wish had won.
In addition to all the other problems with OI, I think that attitude does a great disservice to the Constitution. The Founding Fathers made many compromises and deliberately left ambiguous terms in the Constitution. They trusted their descendants to interpret those terms wisely. They left room for society to change, grow and come to consensus on issues that they themselves could not right in the Constitution. Going back to them to settle disputes they they themselves chose not to settle when they wrote the document seems to me to be deliberately turning our back on the Constitution itself.
March 27th, 2008
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General, Legal Issues |
15 comments
Let’s mix a gun control debate with a semantic debate, and see what happens. At issue here: Whether a pro-gun ruling in Heller would recognize a “new” Constitutional right. I’m still slogging through the comments, but so far this one is among the best (after the fold):
March 24th, 2008
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Legal Issues, Bloggin, Weekend Flame Bait |
2 comments
The principal writers of The Wire, the HBO drama about the Baltimore underworld, have published a public call for civil disobedience in non-violent drug crime prosecutions:
[The drug] war grinds on, flooding our prisons, devouring resources, turning city neighborhoods into free-fire zones. To what end? State and federal prisons are packed with victims of the drug conflict. A new report by the Pew Center shows that 1 of every 100 adults in the U.S. — and 1 in 15 black men over 18 — is currently incarcerated. That’s the world’s highest rate of imprisonment.
The drug war has ravaged law enforcement too. In cities where police agencies commit the most resources to arresting their way out of their drug problems, the arrest rates for violent crime — murder, rape, aggravated assault — have declined. In Baltimore, where we set The Wire, drug arrests have skyrocketed over the past three decades, yet in that same span, arrest rates for murder have gone from 80% and 90% to half that. Lost in an unwinnable drug war, a new generation of law officers is no longer capable of investigating crime properly, having learned only to make court pay by grabbing cheap, meaningless drug arrests off the nearest corner.
What the drugs themselves have not destroyed, the warfare against them has. And what once began, perhaps, as a battle against dangerous substances long ago transformed itself into a venal war on our underclass. Since declaring war on drugs nearly 40 years ago, we’ve been demonizing our most desperate citizens, isolating and incarcerating them and otherwise denying them a role in the American collective. All to no purpose. The prison population doubles and doubles again; the drugs remain. . . .
[W]e offer a small idea that is, perhaps, no small idea. It will not solve the drug problem, nor will it heal all civic wounds. It does not yet address questions of how the resources spent warring with our poor over drug use might be better spent on treatment or education or job training, or anything else that might begin to restore those places in America where the only economic engine remaining is the illegal drug economy. It doesn’t resolve the myriad complexities that a retreat from war to sanity will require. All it does is open a range of intricate, paradoxical issues. But this is what we can do — and what we will do.
If asked to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented. Save for a prosecution in which acts of violence or intended violence are alleged, we will — to borrow Justice Harry Blackmun’s manifesto against the death penalty — no longer tinker with the machinery of the drug war. No longer can we collaborate with a government that uses nonviolent drug offenses to fill prisons with its poorest, most damaged and most desperate citizens.
“Jury nullification” has often been urged as a strategy against perceived government abuses, particularly in the case of drug crimes. (It is also a favorite mythology of the delusional far-right militia types, which hardly makes it more attractive.) I have written about my own flirtation with that path, under similar circumstances. But in this case they are advocating it not merely as a protest against unjust laws, but as a strategy to get those laws overturned by making them unenforceable.
It would be remarkable if they could recruit enough people to make an observable difference in these cases. What is also remarkable is that this article appeared in Time magazine - once the bastion of toe-the-line traditionalism. It’s interesting, too, that the staff of a popular TV show would take such a stand publicly - advocating for civil disobedience on a controversial issue involving widely-despised behavior, and linking their stance, indirectly at least, to the content of their show. Simply by countenancing such statements, both Time and HBO signal that this stance - open recruitment to contempt for the law - has come within the bounds of acceptable opinion. (This isn’t the first time network TV has taken such risks. The coded anti-Vietnam-war ethos of M*A*S*H, and the somewhat tame feminism of Maude and One Day at a Time were controversial in their day, and also reflected the personal opinions of their stars or producers. But they didn’t advocate civil disobedience.)
I wonder if these could be signs of a turning tide in the “War on Drugs”.
March 6th, 2008
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General, Politics, Legal Issues, Culture, News & Current Events |
5 comments
I’ve been ambivalent as between Hillary and Obama - each has great strengths and also some flaws or weaknesses. But Obama impresses me more and more as a man whose principles are more than window-dressing, and sorely needed. Today, he proved it beyond question:
An Open Letter to LGBT Americans
I’m running for President to build an America that lives up to our founding promise of equality for all – a promise that extends to our gay brothers and sisters. It’s wrong to have millions of Americans living as second-class citizens in this nation. And I ask for your support in this election so that together we can bring about real change for all LGBT Americans.
Equality is a moral imperative. That’s why throughout my career, I have fought to eliminate discrimination against LGBT Americans. In Illinois, I co-sponsored a fully inclusive bill that prohibited discrimination on the basis of both sexual orientation and gender identity, extending protection to the workplace, housing, and places of public accommodation. In the U.S. Senate, I have co-sponsored bills that would equalize tax treatment for same-sex couples and provide benefits to domestic partners of federal employees. And as president, I will place the weight of my administration behind the enactment of the Matthew Shepard Act to outlaw hate crimes and a fully inclusive Employment Non-Discrimination Act to outlaw workplace discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.
As your President, I will use the bully pulpit to urge states to treat same-sex couples with full equality in their family and adoption laws. I personally believe that civil unions represent the best way to secure that equal treatment. But I also believe that the federal government should not stand in the way of states that want to decide on their own how best to pursue equality for gay and lesbian couples — whether that means a domestic partnership, a civil union, or a civil marriage. Unlike Senator Clinton, I support the complete repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) – a position I have held since before arriving in the U.S. Senate. While some say we should repeal only part of the law, I believe we should get rid of that statute altogether. Federal law should not discriminate in any way against gay and lesbian couples, which is precisely what DOMA does. I have also called for us to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and I have worked to improve the Uniting American Families Act so we can afford same-sex couples the same rights and obligations as married couples in our immigration system.
The next president must also address the HIV/AIDS epidemic. When it comes to prevention, we do not have to choose between values and science. While abstinence education should be part of any strategy, we also need to use common sense. We should have age-appropriate sex education that includes information about contraception. We should pass the JUSTICE Act to combat infection within our prison population. And we should lift the federal ban on needle exchange, which could dramatically reduce rates of infection among drug users. In addition, local governments can protect public health by distributing contraceptives.
We also need a president who’s willing to confront the stigma – too often tied to homophobia– that continues to surround HIV/AIDS. I confronted this stigma directly in a speech to evangelicals at Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church, and will continue to speak out as president. That is where I stand on the major issues of the day. But having the right positions on the issues is only half the battle. The other half is to win broad support for those positions. And winning broad support will require stepping outside our comfort zone. If we want to repeal DOMA, repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and implement fully inclusive laws outlawing hate crimes and discrimination in the workplace, we need to bring the message of LGBT equality to skeptical audiences as well as friendly ones – and that’s what I’ve done throughout my career. I brought this message of inclusiveness to all of America in my keynote address at the 2004 Democratic convention. I talked about the need to fight homophobia when I announced my candidacy for President, and I have been talking about LGBT equality to a number of groups during this campaign – from local LGBT activists to rural farmers to parishioners at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where Dr. Martin Luther King once preached.
Just as important, I have been listening to what all Americans have to say. I will never compromise on my commitment to equal rights for all LGBT Americans. But neither will I close my ears to the voices of those who still need to be convinced. That is the work we must do to move forward together. It is difficult. It is challenging. And it is necessary.
Americans are yearning for leadership that can empower us to reach for what we know is possible. I believe that we can achieve the goal of full equality for the millions of LGBT people in this country. To do that, we need leadership that can appeal to the best parts of the human spirit. Join with me, and I will provide that leadership. Together, we will achieve real equality for all Americans, gay and straight alike.
Barack Obama
It rankles a little that he still finds it necessary to equivocate on this “civil union” nonsense, but it’s important to remember that that was the progressive position on gay rights just a few years ago. No one in high office, in the history of this nation, has made so forthright and so morally upright a statement in favor of full and uncompromising equality - certainly none with the Presidency in their grasp, still less on the very issue that the haters and bigots had used to put one of their own into the Presidency at the very time it was said. He didn’t have to say it - he could have coasted into office while keeping this issue on the back burner - but he chose to stand up in a way that was so badly needed, and will cause such a vicious backlash, and that he could have so easily avoided.
Aside from simply being right on an important issue, Obama today showed remarkable moral depth. It was inspiring - in a way that has nothing to do with rhetoric or visionary exhortation, but with true moral courage and the dedication to govern his life and work by his ideals. It is impossible not to admire this.
February 28th, 2008
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General, Politics, Legal Issues, Church & State, Religion, Culture, News & Current Events |
72 comments
Last weekend, I pulled a little stunt to make a point about voter ID laws. I chose to use the gun rights movement as an example here, because many of their legitimate complaints about various gun control laws (e.g., that they harm the law abiding more than the potential criminals, that they’re ineffective, etc.) apply to voter ID laws. But in the case of voter ID laws, these arguments are even stronger.
The truth of the matter is, voter fraud is vanishingly rare. In two of the most contested elections in recent memory (Washington’s gubernatorial race in 2004 and Ohio’s presidential election), fewer than one vote per 100,000 was found to be fraudulent (0.00009% and 0.00004%, respectively). To put this into perspective, if you rounded up to 0.0001% and applied that rate of voter fraud to Florida’s presidential in 2000, it would have amounted to fewer than 600 total votes — not enough to change the result of that election even if every single fraudulent vote were cast for the same candidate.
Meanwhile, requiring a photo ID to vote could disenfranchise nearly 10% of the eligible population, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. In other words, it would potentially inhibit 1,000,000 times as many legitimate voters as fraudulent voters.
Set aside, for the moment, whether you think an ID requirement seems “reasonable,” and ask yourself whether it’s really worth passing a new law, and making eligible voters jump through hoops they’d otherwise not have to jump through, to solve a problem that all the evidence suggests is statistically insignificant.
(Why, then, is there such a big push for voter ID requirements? The cynical answer is to look at the demographics of the eligible voters who are most likely to lack a state-issued photo ID, and to look at who they typically vote for.)
If you’re worried about the integrity of our elections, the much bigger fish is computerized voting. Even ignoring the potential for fraud and abuse at the machine level, the machines are simply more prone to errors than the individual voter fraud rate.
Read the full report from the Brennan Center here (PDF).
UPDATE: I did the “early voting” thing tonight, and while I was there, I asked the poll worker about voting without a photo ID. He told me that here in Tennessee, no photo ID is required. A voter registration card (which has no photo) is sufficient. If you have neither a photo ID nor a voter registration card, you can fill out an “oath of voter” card, and you may then cast a provisional ballot, which gets counted once the information you provided can be verified and matched against an existing registration. I didn’t ask if it was possible to register to vote on site, and he didn’t say.
UPDATE 2: You can see what the voter ID requirements are in your state the 25 ID-requiring states here.
UPDATE 3: Some have questioned the Brennan Center’s estimate that nearly 10% of eligible voters lack photo ID. I found another study, this one from American University (PDF) that claims that 1.2% of registered voters lack photo ID — roughly 2 million registered voters. It’s not apples-to-apples, since you’re dealing with registered voters on one hand and eligible voters on the other, but even with the more conservative number, a photo ID requirement would prevent 120,000 times as many legitimate voters as fraudulent voters. The AU study reveals another interesting characteristic, and one the cynic in me thinks is the real reason behind the push for photo ID requirements: of those registered voters who lack photo ID, over 87% are Democrats, while fewer than 7% are Republicans. (They’re also overwhelmingly females 45 and older.)
January 31st, 2008
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Politics, Legal Issues |
36 comments
Oh, did I say buy a gun? I’m sorry, I meant vote.
Sorry for any confusion this may have caused.
(Kudos to Stormy Dragon and LarryE, who figured out what I was up to.)
UPDATE: Just to be clear, my argument was not intended to be in favor of a gun registry, but rather against laws like Indiana’s voter ID law. No, the analogy isn’t perfect, but many of the same objections apply (e.g., it disproportionately harms the law-abiding; it won’t substantially reduce crime; there’s no evidence that the crime in question is actually widespread; etc.).
January 27th, 2008
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Legal Issues, Weekend Flame Bait |
16 comments
I’d like to propose a new state law. Basically, I think that there are a lot of fraudulent gun purchases being made, and I want to put a stop to it. So here’s what I’m proposing:
- We create a statewide gun purchase registry. Anyone who wishes to buy a gun of any kind must register in advance.
- When a resident wants to buy a gun, they must show a state-issued photo identification.
- Anyone selling a gun must check the purchaser’s photo identification. The name and address on the ID must exactly match the statewide gun registration list. If it does not, the purchase must be refused.
This seems perfectly fair and reasonable to me. Nobody who is legally allowed to buy a gun today would be prevented from buying a gun under this law, and it would prevent fraudulent gun purchases from taking place.
Thoughts?
UPDATE: I’ve issued a correction.
January 25th, 2008
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Legal Issues, Weekend Flame Bait |
31 comments
John Edwards just came out in support of Dodd’s filibuster of the FISA bill that contains telecom immunity. Just a recap, the telecom companies spied on Americans at the Bush Administration’s request without warrants and in clear violation of the law. Now they want to be protected from the consequences of those actions. If this bill passes, the Bill of Rights is quite literally dead, becasue we will have established the principle that private entities should not be held accountable for breaking the law on behalf of the government. And the moment that happens, you can be sure, the government will rush to use private entities to do what courts will not allow them to do.
And please spare me the nonsense about “we must have it to prevent the terrorists form killing us all in our beds!”. if that was true, then why did the companies in question shut down the program after the FBI became delinquent on the program? And more to the point, stop being such a damn coward. The Constitution has kept the country strong and safe and free through a foreign invasion, a civil war, two world wars and a cold war with a nuclear powered enemy. And we are supposed to rush to throw it away becasue a couple of failed goat herders got lucky once? The bill contains the fixes necessary to adopt to the new technological advances. That bill could pass tomorrow, if the telecom immunity was removed. But the White House prefers protecting their own asses to protecting the country.
The question now is where are the front runners? Why are they not in DC, right now, holding a press conference where they clearly state that they will be supporting the filibuster of this cowardly provision. If they showed leadership on this issue — and the right position is the position that is widely supported across the political spectrum — this provision would almost certainly be dead. Support form the campaign trial wont do it. This is a critical juncture in American history and either front runner has the opportunity to make a very real difference with just a little bit of effort. Get back to DC, Senators, and prove that you deserve to be President.
You can encourage them here, and reward Edwards for his good behavior here.
January 24th, 2008
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Politics, Legal Issues |
3 comments
So says Scott Lemieux, and not only is he an assistant poli-sci professor, his argument is detailed and compelling. Part one here, part two here and part three here. They are a bit long, but they are essential reading, especially for anyone who has either been told or who actually believes that Roe was somehow badly decided.
January 23rd, 2008
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General, Legal Issues |
one comment
I am sorry I missed this (been a busy day, personally), but the ACLU is kicking off a close Gito campaign. It has been six years since we opened that black hole. We haven’t given a single person in that camp the rights of a prisoner of war or charged them criminally. The BUsh Administration fought for years to keep them locked away forever, subject only to the whims of Bush or his surrogates. And when the Supreme Court, an institution as far right as any in the country, finally pointed out that such treatment was inhumane, illegal, and un-American, the Bush Administration created a process that kept the accused from seeing the evidence against them and allowed evidence based on torture to be used against them. The prison camp at Gitmo is a symbol to the world of our leader’s cowardice and viciousness and it is the single most effective propaganda tool the terrorists have. When they want to “prove” that all our high minded rhetoric about freedom and democracy is a lie, when they want to “prove” that our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are nothing more than a holy war against Muslim, all they have to do is say one word: Gitmo. It is long past time it be closed.
You can find out more here.
January 11th, 2008
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General, Legal Issues, Iraq, Terrorism, Torture |
one comment
The telcom immunity bill has nothing to do with fighting terrorism. How do I know this? Because the Bush Administration asked for the ability to spy on American neighborhoods before 9/11
In a separate N.S.A. project, executives at a Denver phone carrier, Qwest, refused in early 2001 to give the agency access to their most localized communications switches, which primarily carry domestic calls, according to people aware of the request, which has not been previously reported. They say the arrangement could have permitted neighborhood-by-neighborhood surveillance of phone traffic without a court order, which alarmed them.
This bill is about nothing more than the formalization of Bush’s surveillance state. Starting almost from the moment the Bush Administration gained power, they demanded that the telecom companies allow them access to American’s private phone calls without oversight or a warrant. They wanted to be able to spy on the phone calls of anyone they felt like at any time they felt like without having to even pretend that what they were doing was based on reasonable suspicions of wrongdoing. It’s the kind of thing right wingers always told me I should abhor the Soviet Union for — constant spying on its own citizens. Now, of course, since Bush is doing it, it must somehow be good and the companies that rolled over for the Administration must be protected at all costs.
As worthless as Harry Reid is, there are still some Democrats that are trying to stop this disaster. And it is a disaster. The telecom companies have proven that they are quite willing to hand over our rights to any Administration that comes asking. Letting them get away with it guts the Constitution because it enshrines the principal that the businesses that do the government’s dirty work should be protected. It outsources tyranny, so to speak. Without effective means of making businesses pay for their lawlessness, the government has a perfect end run around the Constitution. Liberals (and, yes, it has to be mentioned that they are liberals. Moderates and conservatives are in the process of rolling over for this. It is important to note and remember who isn’t.) Chris Dodd, Ted Kennedy, and Russ Feingold are going to try and stop it. Go here to find out what you can do to try and help them.
UPDATE [tgirsch]: A message from Sen. Feingold on this issue is up at TPM.
December 17th, 2007
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Legal Issues |
one comment
From the ACLU:
We implore Senator Reid to lead,” said Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office. “Reid has set up a Catch-22 that forces senators to choose either no immunity for the telecoms or minimal Fourth Amendment protections – but not both at the same time. The ACLU is not ready to accept the two current options as the only possibilities. The American people should not have to choose between telecom immunity and warrantless wiretapping.”
Fredrickson explained that Senator Reid employed a little-used Senate rule – Rule Fourteen – to bring up two different FISA bills taken from legislation passed by the Senate Intelligence and Judiciary Committees. The first bill, S. 2440, will be Titles 1 and 3 of the intelligence bill and does not include telecom immunity. The second, S. 2441, will be Titles 1 of the judiciary bill and 2 and 3 of the intelligence bill, which does include immunity. She explained that from the ACLU’s perspective, “Another way to think of it: S 2440 is good on immunity and bad on wiretapping while S. 2441 is bad on immunity but good on wiretapping. It looks as though Senator Reid has created two little FISA Frankensteins.”
The ACLU urges senators to vote against the Intelligence Committee bill, anything resembling the Protect America Act or any bill that grants immunity to telecommunications companies that broke the law over the past six years. Today a group of 14 senators urged Senator Reid to take up the Judiciary bill as it stands with no immunity provision. We are also asking senators to participate in the Dodd filibuster measure against any bill that lets the Bells off the hook.
“Senator Reid is forcing senators to trade the Fourth Amendment to avoid immunity or to give immunity in order to protect Fourth Amendment rights. The ACLU, on behalf its members across this country, asks that he bring the Judiciary Committee’s FISA bill to the floor — without immunity for companies that broke the law,” said Fredrickson.
This would literally destroy any freedom you have from being spied on. By establishing this precedent, that private companies must do as the government tells them to, law and Constitution be damned, we are saying that the Constitution does not apply. All the government has to do is to get a private company to act in its stead and your constitutional rights no longer exist.
The second worst thing, politically, to happen in the last eight years was the defeat of Daschle. Reid has been and will continue to be a disaster as leader. Not only is he completely incapable of dealing with GOP legislative maneuvers, he is apparently a fully paid up member of the authoritarian school of domestic law enforcement.
December 14th, 2007
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Legal Issues, Torture |
15 comments
Glenn Reynolds on the Omaha Mall shooting:
it’s worth noting — since apparently most of the media reports haven’t — that this was another mass shooting in a “gun-free” zone. It seems to me that we’ve reached the point at which a facility that bans firearms, making its patrons unable to defend themselves, should be subject to lawsuit for its failure to protect them. The pattern of mass shootings in “gun free” zones is well-established at this point, and I don’t see why places that take the affirmative step of forcing their law-abiding patrons to go unarmed should get off scot-free.There’s even an academic literature on mass shootings and concealed-gun carriage.
Perhaps we need legislation. If it saves just one life, it’s worth it.
I keep wondering why so many of those who take this view of small arms are ready to start a war to defend precisely the opposite view of nuclear weapons. Surely atom bombs don’t kill people, right? People kill people. A nuclear-armed Persian Gulf is a polite Persian Gulf. After all, once they impose gun control on Iran, they’ll be here next.
Further on the issue of consistency, if Reynolds supports lawsuits against places that ban guns, owing to their effect on the availability of guns for OK Corral-style shootouts in the crowded aisles of suburban shopping malls (which he thinks are a good thing), shouldn’t he also support New-York-City-style lawsuits against gun manufacturers who flood the market with cheap weapons aimed at the criminal crowd, owing to their effect on the availability of guns for people who use them for crimes? After all, if the issue is that the availability of guns has an effect on the balance of power between criminals and other citizens, both sides of that equation are equally contributory, and presumably those who supply guns to the wrong side are at least as much at fault as those who prohibit them to the right side. If it saves just one life, it’s worth it.
I’m sure the Instapundit will be quick to adopt a consistent position on both these issues.
UPDATE: (fixed some formatting errors and typos)
As one commenter noted, Reynolds has responded on his blog. Sadly, all he has managed to do is undermine his own reputation for critical thinking ability.
(1) We don’t allow felons or the mentally ill to carry guns. Iran seems to fit in to this category.
I’ve already responded to a version of this claim in the comments, but I’m surprised to see it from Reynolds. It’s obvious nonsense. For one thing, nations aren’t subject to mental illness. For another, Iran’s leaders don’t seem to be in the least bit irrational, though certainly repressive. (And on the plus side, they’ve invaded fewer countries than George Bush, and likely killed fewer people.) But most important of all, the logic of his own argument has nothing to do with sanity or its lack. His argument against gun control is that it is not successful in preventing felons and the mentally ill from obtaining gus, and that is his reason for advocating wider availability of guns for all; that only serves to strengthen my point. He claims that wider distribution of guns will allow for more aggressive response in cases of violence (what’s better than one person shooting into a crowd in a shopping mall, if you’re Glenn Reynolds? - everyone in the crowd shooting at each other!); obviously that would also be the case regarding nuclear weapons, and so, if his argument makes any sense, he ought to advocate it in that scenario as well. I’m glad he (implicitly) agrees that it would be unthinkable to encourage unregulated distribution of nuclear weapons, but there is no distinction between the logic of my argument for doing so and the logic of his argument for doing the same thing with small arms. I’m glad he also (implicitly) agrees with the rest of the sane world regarding gun control, but it’s disappointing that he doesn’t realize that he agrees. I hope this helps.
(2) Suits against gun manufacturers are an attempt by government officials to circumvent the political process, using tort law to do what they can’t do via legislation because the voters oppose it. I don’t think that applies to my example at all.
How could it not apply? First, the reason for the lawsuits is irrelevant. If the case is actionable - and it certainly should be - the tortfeasors (i.e., irresponsible and murderous gun makers) ought to be held accountable. There’s no right to commit torts against the body politic and then be immune to answering for your actions merely because the civil penalty is brought in a court and not in an election. (The courts are one of the branches of governmental authority. They exist for a reason.) Second, civil authorities are well within their rights to use court actions to enforce public policy - they do it all the time. Distributing guns irresponsibly is as much a public health threat as distributing tainted food or leaded paint, and the government is right to do something about it. Finally, how are ideologically-motivated lawsuits (no doubt ginned up by the same bunch of paid political activists and subsidized plaintiffs as are behind the current Supreme Court gun-rights suit) against what Reynolds himself has noted, on his blog, are “places of public accomodation”, in order to force them to increase the number of guns used in every shooting incident, any less an attempt to create policy through the courts and not the ballot box than are lawsuits aimed at limiting the number of guns used in such incidents? It seems that, for Reynolds, “I don’t think that applies . . .” really means “I realize that refutes . . .”.
December 7th, 2007
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General, Politics, Legal Issues, Culture, News & Current Events |
84 comments
By now, you’ve probably heard about the guy in Texas who, while on the phone with 911, gunned down two people who were burglarizing his neighbor’s house. If you haven’t, the story (with 911 transcript) is here.
SayUncle complains about the “hysteria” of the “anti-gunners”:
Texas has some of the more lenient defense of property laws but they’re still pretty limiting
…snip…
Why would he think that a law that eliminates the duty to retreat instead justifies killing two burglars that were not an imminent threat to him and were not on his property? Probably because he heard that line repeated over and over by the anti-gunners in press coverage of the bill.
I’m not sure I agree with Uncle here. For one thing, Texas’ defense of property laws don’t seem all that limiting to me. Have a look, specifically at Sections 9.41, 9.42, and 9.43. IANAL, but as I read these, you do have a right to use deadly force against someone to prevent them from committing burglary, even of someone else’s property. 9.42.2B explicitly includes a fleeing suspect as a valid target; coupled with 9.43.1, I think he may actually have a valid defense here. All he has to demonstrate is that he “reasonably believed” the use of deadly force was the only way he could prevent the burglars from getting away with the goods.
Uncle may be right that this has nothing to do with so-called “Castle Doctrine” laws, but that’s still splitting hairs, in my opinion. The bottom line is, I think that most of us (including most pro-gun folks) would agree with Uncle’s assessment that the shooting is “sketchy at best and criminal at worse [sic],” yet it might be perfectly legal in Texas.
And that, to me, is just scary. It strikes me as an open invitation to vigilantism. I’m more pro-gun than most on the left, but this is just ridiculous.
As a side note, if you’re a supporter of gun rights and defense of property laws in general, you should probably hope that the shooter does get some sort of legal punishment. Because if he doesn’t, this will almost certainly galvanize a repeal movement.
November 28th, 2007
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Legal Issues, Weekend Flame Bait, News & Current Events |
5 comments
It appears that the Democratic leadership twisted some arms and telecom immunity is now out of the FISA replacement bill:
Reflecting the deep divisions within Congress over granting legal immunity to telephone companies for cooperating with the Bush administration’s program of wiretapping without warrants, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved a new domestic surveillance law on Thursday that sidestepped the issue.
By a 10 to 9 vote, the committee approved an overhaul of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that dropped a key provision for immunity for telecommunications companies that another committee had already approved. The Senate leadership will have to decide how to deal with the immunity question on the Senate floor.
On Thursday night, the House voted 227 to 189, generally along party lines, to approve its own version of the FISA bill, which also does not include immunity.
The story is a bit more complicated than the Times is letting on. Before the 10-9 vote, Feinstein and Whitehorse, both Dems, voted with the GOP to kill Feingold’s amendment to ban immunity for the telecom companies. Bit a couple of minutes later, Leahy got them to agree to pass this bill which does not grant immunity to the telecom companies. And, best of all, Reid’s staff is telling people that Leahy’s billis the one that will be advanced to the full Senate. So the leadership has taken sides here, and they have come down pretty squarely against telecom immunity.
This is a first good step. Allowing the government to “outsource” its violations of the Constitution to private concerns and then immunizing those concerns from punishment for their roles in such violations is a recipe for tyranny. I’ve said this before, but an emploiyee of ATT can take away your freedom just as throughly as an employee of the government. The only way to prevent that is either criminal penalties — which are extremely unlikely when the government itself solicited the crime — or civil penalties.
It is also encouraging that the leadership drove this change in the bills. it gives me some hope that when the inevitable veto showdown occurs, the Dems wont just wilt on these issues. It would be nice to have a political party in this country that actrually stands up for the Constitution. I realize that the Dems, as a rule, don’t engage in these unitary executive games when they have power, but thats not enough. They need to stand up in defense of the Constitution and that means trying to roll back the damage the Bush Administration has done. This si a good and encouraging first step, but the fight has barely been joined.
November 16th, 2007
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Politics, Legal Issues, Terrorism, NSA |
2 comments
Who would ever have thought that bottom-dwelling conservative hack shop Regnery Publishing was sleazily ripping off its own sleazy authors? Not those authors, apparently. Now the moral beacons who brought us Swiftboating and various hack jobs attacking Bill Clinton and praising George Bush have suddenly discovered that the press that was low enough to publish their bilge was also not above stealing their royalties. Forgive me while I laugh my goddam ass off . . .
In a suit filed in United States District Court in Washington yesterday, the authors Jerome R. Corsi [founder of the Swift Boat Vets], Bill Gertz, Lt. Col. Robert (Buzz) Patterson, Joel Mowbray and Richard Miniter state that Eagle Publishing, which owns Regnery, “orchestrates and participates in a fraudulent, deceptively concealed and self-dealing scheme to divert book sales away from retail outlets and to wholly owned subsidiary organizations within the Eagle conglomerate.” . . .
“They’ve structured their business essentially as a scam and are defrauding their writers,” Mr. Miniter said in an interview, “causing a tremendous rift inside the conservative community.” . . .
The press negotiated a standard advance fee/royalty package with the authors, but added a clause providing lower royalty percentages for books sold at discount. It then began selling as much as half their books at cost to its own subsidiaries, to use as incentive gifts or to re-sell at a profit. Because the books were sold at or just above cost, the authors got virtually no royalties on them, but the company got to keep the profits from the resale by its own subsidiaries. The authors got double-screwed because the giveaways don’t count in the standard industry calculations of sales volume, thus leaving them at a disadvantage when they later tried to negotiate deals with other publishers.
Now, that’s just straightforward fraud. But what’s delicious about it - aside from the fact that the authors so righteously deserved it - is that these writers seem so nonplussed that an explicitly conservative business operation would rip off the people who provide their saleable goods! What’s that? A privately-owned right-wing business is underpaying its workers and chiseling its contracted partners out of greed? There’s something about fuck-you capitalism that actually works to the disadvantage of the people under its thumb? That’s . . . amazing. Somebody should do something about this! Why didn’t anyone warn them?!
It really just sums up right-wing hackery in a nutshell. These tools, having made their careers on the fringes of the self-congratulation society that is right-wing “scholarship”, really believed that they’d be taken care of. They figured that the cushy deals and uncritical flattery that rain down on AEI think-tank lapdogs like Dinesh D’Souza would be guaranteed to them also, simply because they were equally willing to say what their overlords wanted to hear. They forgot that Regnery was a profit-making enterprise - and quite possibly they’d never been on the supply end of the profit equation before. Their dazed sense of injury is just priceless:
Mr. Miniter said. “It suddenly occurred to us that Regnery is making collectively jillions of dollars off of us and paying us a pittance.” He added: “Why is Regnery acting like a Marxist cartoon of a capitalist company?”
Dude: because they can.
What a maroon. He actually believed they wouldn’t screw him if they got a chance. He really seems to think that capitalist companies don’t act that way - that there’s something unreal or cartoonish about it when they do. He stumbles to the obvious conclusion but still can’t bring himself to believe it: the company is making money off its workers and paying them as little as possible, just like critics of capitalism have always said they do. Somehow, he manages to call that a cartoon while simultaneously complaining that it’s really happening to him. He is obviously stunned that his preferred fairytale, in which companies gladly provide wealth and comforts to anyone who can build a better mousetrap for them, doesn’t actually work, but he shows no sign of abandoning that fairytale in favor of the descriptive narrative of capitalism that he himself provided, and which he himself states is actually true in this case, but he still implicitly insists is false. Well, he’s one step closer to seeing the light. Couldn’t happen to a more deserving bunch.
November 7th, 2007
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General, Politics, Legal Issues, Economics, Culture, Libertarian Problem Solving, News & Current Events, How Capitalism Will Ruin You |
7 comments
Rumor has it that telecom amnesty is working its way back into the telecom bill in the Senate. People who support the amnesty like to claim that the companies should not be punished for doing what the government asked of them. That is a terrible notion.
First, it makes no sense. The law is not what any particular Administration says it is. Companies as powerful and profitable as the ones in question have more lawyers than you can count in a day. It is not unreasonable to expect that such well defended companies would have the legal brainpower to realize that they were, in fact, being asked ot break the law. And break it they did, for years past the immediate emergency, mooting any notion that they were just trying to be good citizens in a time of immediate crisis. They were trying to curry favor with the Administration in power, their obligation to respect the laws of the land be damned.
Which brings us to the real problem with telecom amnesty. These companies were perfectly positioned to defend both themselves and the rule of law form the overreach of the Bush Administration. If we let these companies off the hook, if we say to them, well, it’s okay, the government asked you to, then we are setting a very dangerous precedent. One of the very few things that keeps corporations in line, outside of government regulation, is the notion that any particular bad act would be more costly to them in lost good will and at trial than profitable by itself. The amnesty would not only prevent future governments form criminally prosecuting them, but would also shut down ongoing civil cases. The public would never know the extent to which these companies betrayed thier fellow citizens and their would be no concrete punishment for that betrayal. If we allow that, then we have a created a situation where any Administration could ask a private company to violate any one of the provisions of the Bill of Rights for it and suffer no consequences, since it would be then established that no company should be punished for being a “good citizen” and doing as their government asks.
Your freedoms can be taken away by an employee of ATT just as easily as they can be taken away by a government employee. Telcom amnesty and the mainstreaming of the notion that a company should not be punished for doing what any given White House told them to do would essentially allow the outsourcing of the death of the Bill of Right.
November 6th, 2007
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Legal Issues, Economics, How Capitalism Will Ruin You |
one comment
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