It’s Called Breaking The Law, Plain and Simple
January 17, 2007 – 3:14 pmI still chuckle a bit when I read a news report like this one at CNN. Here’s the “funny” bit:
The Bush administration has asserted for more than a year that it had the authority to monitor U.S. residents’ international communications without a judge’s approval, as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act requires. But many lawmakers and legal observers have questioned that claim and argued that President Bush violated that 1978 law by authorizing the eavesdropping.
“[M]any lawmaker and legal observers have questioned that claim”? Really? There’s no debate here. The president and his administration broke the law. Period. It’s not a debate. It’s not questionable. Hell, even the president will admit he broke the law. The debate, if you even want to call it that, is not whether the president broke the law; the debate is whether the president has the power to break any law of his or her choosing. Many, many people think the president has no such power. President Bush and Vice President Cheney believe the president does have such power.
But why must the reporter couch this discussion in such clouded verbiage? The facts of the matter are that the president violated FISA, an act of Congress passed in 1978. The attorney general admits that the president violated this law, on a repeated basis. Again, there’s no debate here. The administration openly admits it has been spying on Americans without court-issued warrants for quite some time now. Done and done. Why can’t the news media just come out and say it?
One Response to “It’s Called Breaking The Law, Plain and Simple”
When this story first came out, after Congress passed some new law with regards to the USPS and Bush did his typical “This is why the law doesn’t apply to me” signing statement, it was naturally in the evening news. What surprised me was that many of the people interviewed on the news were Republicans, and most of them said something along the lines of “Bush’s signing statement ignores both the letter and the spirit of this new law.”
I wonder if Bush is going to get a presidential pardon from the next guy, just like Nixon, or if he will be held accountable once he’s out of office. At the very least, I hope that the next guy takes out a big magic marker and gets rid of all of those signing statements.
By Adam on Jan 17, 2007 at 5:52 pm