Wish I'd Said That
One of the best wordsmiths in Blog Nation nails a fundamental issue in the scandal over illegal spying by King George. Noting the first flurry of public opinion polls shows wildly variant levels of support for the NSA's latest outrage, Billmon gets right to the point:
"The whole point of having civil liberties is that they are not supposed to be subject to a majority veto. Hobbes may not have believed in natural rights, but our founders did. And their opponents, the anti-Federalists, were even more zealous about restraining the powers of the federal superstate, which is why they forced the Federalists to write the Bill of Rights directly into the Constitution.
It defeats the purpose of having a 4th Amendment if its validiity is entirely dependent on breaking 50% in the latest poll. It would be nice to have 'the people' on our side in this debate, and obviously a lot of them are, even if [a] plurality still prefers Leviathan's crushing embrace. But some things are wrong just because they're wrong -- not because a temporary majority (or even a permanent one) thinks they're wrong."
http://www.billmon.org/
The British mathematician and social critic Bertrand Russell is credited with these words of wisdom: "If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing." Pollsters, of course, are tone deaf to this truism.
The NSA phone records database is doubly illegal. It is against the law for the government to collect those records without a search warrant, and it is illegal for the phone companies to surrender those records without being presented with a search warrant. And that has been true since 1934. Yet an "instant poll" conducted for the Washington Post and ABC News (both of whom should know better) found 63% of those surveyed find collection of phone records "acceptable". And 66% professed it would not "bother" them to learn their own phone records had been collected. At no point, however, were respondents informed that the collection of those records was a violation of federal law. Might that change their reaction?
Of course it would:
"In the latest Newsweek Poll, a majority of Americans polled, 53 percent, believe that reports that the NSA has been secretly collecting the phone records of U.S. citizens since the 9/11 terrorist attacks to create a database of calls 'goes too far in invading people's privacy,' while 41 percent feel it is 'a necessary tool to combat terrorism.' In light of this news and other actions by the Bush-Cheney administration, 57 percent of Americans say they have gone too far in expanding presidential power, while only 38 percent say they have not." http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/060514/nysu010.html?.v=55
So which is it? Billmon's point is this: it doesn't matter. Our liberties are not protected by the prevailing winds of public opinion, nor by the empty promises of the political party in power. They are protcted by the Constitution of the United States, whether King George feels obligated to acknowledge that or not.
One can be sure of this: when the Bushies start showing up in the dock as criminal defendants, they will all demand the same Constitutional protections they are now so vigorously trying to take away from the rest of us.
"The whole point of having civil liberties is that they are not supposed to be subject to a majority veto. Hobbes may not have believed in natural rights, but our founders did. And their opponents, the anti-Federalists, were even more zealous about restraining the powers of the federal superstate, which is why they forced the Federalists to write the Bill of Rights directly into the Constitution.
It defeats the purpose of having a 4th Amendment if its validiity is entirely dependent on breaking 50% in the latest poll. It would be nice to have 'the people' on our side in this debate, and obviously a lot of them are, even if [a] plurality still prefers Leviathan's crushing embrace. But some things are wrong just because they're wrong -- not because a temporary majority (or even a permanent one) thinks they're wrong."
http://www.billmon.org/
The British mathematician and social critic Bertrand Russell is credited with these words of wisdom: "If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing." Pollsters, of course, are tone deaf to this truism.
The NSA phone records database is doubly illegal. It is against the law for the government to collect those records without a search warrant, and it is illegal for the phone companies to surrender those records without being presented with a search warrant. And that has been true since 1934. Yet an "instant poll" conducted for the Washington Post and ABC News (both of whom should know better) found 63% of those surveyed find collection of phone records "acceptable". And 66% professed it would not "bother" them to learn their own phone records had been collected. At no point, however, were respondents informed that the collection of those records was a violation of federal law. Might that change their reaction?
Of course it would:
"In the latest Newsweek Poll, a majority of Americans polled, 53 percent, believe that reports that the NSA has been secretly collecting the phone records of U.S. citizens since the 9/11 terrorist attacks to create a database of calls 'goes too far in invading people's privacy,' while 41 percent feel it is 'a necessary tool to combat terrorism.' In light of this news and other actions by the Bush-Cheney administration, 57 percent of Americans say they have gone too far in expanding presidential power, while only 38 percent say they have not." http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/060514/nysu010.html?.v=55
So which is it? Billmon's point is this: it doesn't matter. Our liberties are not protected by the prevailing winds of public opinion, nor by the empty promises of the political party in power. They are protcted by the Constitution of the United States, whether King George feels obligated to acknowledge that or not.
One can be sure of this: when the Bushies start showing up in the dock as criminal defendants, they will all demand the same Constitutional protections they are now so vigorously trying to take away from the rest of us.
posted by wally at 10:25 AM
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