Howard: Wiretaps just a sign of parties’ inadequacy

A U.S. district judge in San Francisco ruled last Wednesday that the National Security… A U.S. district judge in San Francisco ruled last Wednesday that the National Security Agency’s program of warrantless wiretaps of American phone and e-mail conversations is illegal, The New York Times reported. Created secretly by the Bush administration in the days after 9/11, the NSA surveillance program was the subject of countless attacks by prominent Democrats who called it unconstitutional and illegal.

As a Democratic senator campaigning for president, Barack Obama made one such attack when he promised to abandon the “false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we provide.” Indeed, Obama’s rhetoric echoed the sentiment of voters who, a 2007 poll conducted by the Mellman Group showed, widely opposed the Bush wiretap program by a margin of 61 to 35 percent.

As clear-cut as the polls and the rhetoric were, Obama reversed his position mid-campaign and voted for the 2008 overhaul of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that legalized much of the Bush wiretap program and granted retroactive immunity to the telecom companies that helped the Bush administration spy on Americans.

When Obama assumed the presidency, he continued to make use of the warrantless surveillance program and even violated the limits of the very law he voted for in 2008. Today, “Obama’s administration now relies heavily on such surveillance in its fight against Al Qaeda,” The New York Times reported.

Importantly, not only did President Obama continue to use the Bush-era surveillance program that he denounced as a senator, his administration even employed the same legal arguments used by Bush’s Department of Justice to defend the program in court.

For example, in the case above, an Islamic charity alleged that the NSA illegally listened to phone conversations between the charity and its lawyers without obtaining a warrant. Rather than argue over the program’s legality, the Obama Administration copied a play from the Bush administration and attempted to assert the state secrets privilege, arguing that discussing the case in court jeopardized national security.

These similarities in the security policies and legal strategies of the Bush and Obama administrations are illustrative of one important point: Government, no matter which party is in control, is rarely willing to relinquish powers it has accumulated whether those powers were attained legally or illegally.

Although the differences between Republicans and Democrats might appear stark in light of health care reform, we should not be fooled into believing that either party is committed to restoring American liberty. For this reason, as I think about the 2010 elections, I find myself unable to feel too enthusiastic about the possibility of a Republican resurgence.

After all, the party that gave us warrantless surveillance in the first place gives us few signs that it understands the lessons of the Bush era and even fewer that it is willing to apply them. It is still the party that would restrict abortion rights, stagnate LGBT rights and sacrifice liberty to ensure temporary security.

Sure, the Republicans were opposed to expanding government control over one-sixth of the American economy, but there is little evidence that Republicans fully understand the moral argument against government expansion and still less evidence that they would be able to successfully appeal all or part of Obamacare anytime in the next decade.

For this reason, we must understand that the way to shrink the government and limit its ability to intrude into our daily lives is not simply to elect a candidate with a different letter after his name. We tried this with Obama and he’s clearly shown that he cannot be trusted to restore American civil liberties.

Instead, we must find new ways to limit the size of a government that concurrently limit the power of political parties, the earning potential of career politicians and the ability of said politicians to isolate themselves from the public. Possible solutions could be found in the methods adopted by individual states to slow the growth of government.

Texas, for instance, has a part-time legislature that meets for only 140 days every two years and then holds special sessions as situations merit it. Its costs are far lower than those of full-time state legislatures, and most importantly, its legislators are not career politicians but instead regular people who must work in their state like everyone else under the laws they pass.

Indeed, I believe that legislation produced by our federal government would look very different if Congress were comprised of citizen lawmakers rather than career politicians. I doubt that many citizen lawmakers would vote to give a government agency the power to spy on Americans without warrants or regulate one-sixth of the economy if they felt that the law might apply to them at some point.

Continue the conversation at Giles’s blog, www.gilesbhoward.com/blog/, or e-mail giles at gbh4@pitt.edu.