Text of Gore's Speech Today
Here. (Via Atrios)
Beautifully put, carefully reasoned, non-hyperbolic.
If all the votes had been counted--if we had taken to the streets to insist that all the votes be counted in the same numbers Republicans took to the streets to insist that they not be--this man would probably be our president. Remember what it was like to have an intelligent, knowledgeable, intellectually honest president? Seems like a distant dream these days...
Here. (Via Atrios)
Beautifully put, carefully reasoned, non-hyperbolic.
If all the votes had been counted--if we had taken to the streets to insist that all the votes be counted in the same numbers Republicans took to the streets to insist that they not be--this man would probably be our president. Remember what it was like to have an intelligent, knowledgeable, intellectually honest president? Seems like a distant dream these days...
posted by Winston Smith at
1:03 PM
29 Comments:
Oooops. Gore forgot to mention it was St. Bobby Kennedy who wiretapped MLK. I thought only evil guys who pursue power for the sake of power did stuff like that.
#1. Was the wiretapping counter to an explicit act of Congress?
#2. I still think RFK should have been taken to the woodshed for it on general principle.
As Groucho said, "Those are my principles. And if you don't like them, I have others". ;)
I was inspired by this to extend my remarks on Mr. Gore at my groupblog. Feel free to bring the pain.
My groupblog, bring the pain.
I agree with Tony D., esp. that Gore's main point is about unchecked executive power. And I agree that that's the main point here. Hell, I can imagine all sorts of ways that the wiretap issue might go once all the info is out. Maybe Bush got that one right. I'm more worried about his contemptuous attitude toward the law and the truth.
Oops. Sorry, posted this on the wrong thread above. It belongs here.
Winston and Tony:
Exactly. I think Anonymous got to the heart of the matter in a thread awhile back when he/she said this:
"What is infuriating about the press reaction to this whole affair is their near universal stuffing of the issue into the privacy vs. security box. Even supposing the the President's defenders are right, and this is a new kind of situation that demands additional power of suveilance, the administration simply never asked for it. Instead, they *told* the legislative and judicial branches of the government what they were going to do, and then ordered them to keep it secret from the public. Basicly, the President treated both Senators and federal Judges like employees in some buisiness that he owned. This would be a gross usurpation of power even if the law the Prez wanted to break was genuinely stupid and dangerous. To make as if what is wrong with all this is that the administration has stayed too far along some safety/liberty continuum is to miss the point entirely. Unfortunately, that is the way the question is couched in the Post poll, and we cannot be surprised at the numbers that came back."
In the spirit of the above post about correcting "your side's" errors, I feel like I need to point out that this statement of Gore's:
"Over 100 of these captives have reportedly died while being tortured by Executive branch interrogators and many more have been broken and humiliated."
is painfully incorrect. There've been about 150 deaths in custody, but only about 8 have been credibly documented to implicate torture. Reading broadly, there are about 10-15 more deaths where there isn't very much information and what scraps there are do indicate that torture might have played some role, but still, Gore is off by an order of magnitude here.
No, Tony, I didn't expect Gore to mention Bobby Kennedy. I mentioned him to put this in perspective.
I don't find Gore's speech bipartisan, since it contains a laundry list of attacks on the administration, on such unrelated matters as Medicare.
I do not find the phrase "power grab" bipartisan, and there's other contentious language as well.
I also did not expect Gore to mention his own administration's defense of the same damn thing. See deputy attorney general Jamie Gorelick's testimony before congress in 1994.
The constitutionality of the FISA law (which the right-wing echo chamber tells me Clinton ignored in the Aldrich Ames case) itself has never been adjucated by the Supreme Court. It remains an open question.
Gore's is not a consideration of the issue, it's a partisan attack on the administration, plain and simple.
TVD, note that Gorelick testified pre-FISA.
FISA was passed in 1978. Gorelick's testimony reads like it could be given today by a Bushie.
Like the concept that the Second Amendment provides for an individual's right to own guns, FISA's constitutionality has never been definitively ruled on by the Supreme Court.
Therefore, our takes on either issue remain principled differences of opinion, since we all know the law is whatever the SC says it is, and it hasn't said.
Jeez, TVD, FISA was amended in 1995. The Clinton admin complied with the law on the books.
After 1995 and not before, you mean?
Regardless, both Gorelick and Gonzales have held that the executive had the constitutional power to conduct warrantless searches. The Supreme Court hasn't ruled on whether they are right.
Jeez.
Before and after. It's like this: there is a law on the books allowing x on its face, the constitutionality of x being something untested in the courts. Admin C believes they can do x. Doing x is lawful until someone brings a case to the SC. One day Congress changes the law to disallow x. Admin C obeys that law, obtaining warrants (sometimes retroactively in the allowed window). Admin C acts lawfully and constitionally. Now Admin Ch comes into power and does x. Admin Ch is breaking the law. The executive doesn't have the constitutional power to break the law (at least under sane constitutional theories). Hence admin Ch is acting unconstitutionally as well as unlawfully. Does admin Ch suck? Yes, it does. Now there's a great national disaster convincing some that x should be allowed. Does admin Ch, which controls all the branches of govt, change the law? No, it prefers to act without any sort of oversight, endangering prosecutions all over the land as a consequence. Does admin Ch suck long and hard? Yes, it does.
our takes on either issue remain principled differences of opinion, since we all know the law is whatever the SC says it is, and it hasn't said.
Rank sophistry. Ah, the hell with false civility - bullshit. As rilkefan patiently explained above, there's a presumption of constitutionality. Otherwise, there is no law.
Apparently, neither Gore nor his supporters can conceive a difference of legal opinion without one side earning moral condemnation. And in this case, crude epithets as well, which makes for an interesting combination.
This might help:
http://thinkprogress.org/2006/01/17/ap-reports-facts/
Good job Mike R correcting Gore's numbers. If you're right about that, then that's an extremely important error...or perhaps worse.
I'm not clear on the timeline re: FISA revisions etc., but sounds to me like Rilkefan's right about this if he's got the timeline right.
TVD joins the ranks of the legal relativists - when it's convenient for his brand of head-in-the-sand sophistry. He's still mouthing bullshit, even if his ears are too tender to have that pointed out to him.
Mike, do you have a citation?
I wonder, has the Supreme Court ever ruled directly on the constitutionality of murder statutes? If no, does that mean that we don't know whether it's illegal to kill someone?
To come (unnecessarily) to TVD's defense, there's an argument to be had about the wisdom of warrantless searches - the Clinton admin apparently searched Ames's house without a warrant in '93, an action which was apparently legal but which I (ignorant of the law as I am) would have told you was illegal under the 4th Amendment. Probably some or many of the partisans on the left are unaware of this side-issue (though an issue of definite importance to many). I had hoped to have indicated that this is a legitimate area of controversy above, but it bears being plainly said.
Re the 150 deaths: there haven't been any executions, and I doubt many natural expirations, so the remaining explanations seem to be suicide, torture, and detainee vs detainee violence. Somehow I don't see the above as inconsistent with plain torture for this argument - driving men to suicide (at a higher rate than under civilized incarceration) or housing them in conditions of fatal brutality are about up there with the lash and the strappado.
Of course philosophically I'm a legal relativist, or more accurately, not an absolutist, and the Underground Railroad is my defense. To be an absolutist is to be a robot.
I would be interested to know if New Hampshire abortion providers are now notifying parents, presuming a constitutionality of the new law.
Thx for that, Rilke. Prevailing legal thought seems to draw no distinction between physical and electronic searches.
The NSA program is a settled matter in the echo chamber, but in the real world, Dubya is merrily listening away. The only way to stop him is for someone with standing (i.e. a member of congress) to sue and get it before the courts.
When Clinton opened hostilities in Kosovo without congressional approval, 17 members of congress sued, claiming he didn't have the constitutional authority. They lost, but that's the mechanism.
I think it would be great for the country for Democrats to defend an abstract principle and a law of questionable constitutionality against Bush's wiretapping of self-avowed murderous enemies.
Go for it.
(Tony, since the subtext has been that anyone who would wiretap like this is some sort of power-mad monster, then so was Bobby Kennedy. That was my point. I'm just not feeling the love, or the empathy I've come to expect from liberals, lovable or otherwise.
And if you read Gore's indictment of the administration on a half-dozen other matters as "non-partisan," well, what can I say?)
Note that Bush stepped back (think around a year ago) from the worst violations of the FISA law. It's not clear to me how to stop the executive from doing something illegal than by impeaching him, which would be fine with me. Don't see why TVD doesn't just acknowledge that Bush has been breaking the law; that would make the discussion clearer. If you want someone on the left to say what RFK did sucked, sure, I agree. That it occurred before the post-Watergate laws has to be acknowledged though.
tony d, the side-issue is whether we agree philosophically with the idea of warrantless searches, independent of the law. To some (many), the admin breaking the law in achieving a worthy goal is different from it breaking the law in achieving a self-serving goal. How one feels about the Ames incident is relevant to that part of the discussion. My cynical suspicion is that some degree of slight lawlessness may be acceptable in times of crisis. If Bush had violated FISA for a few months after 9/11 while working to get the law changed, I think I would have my mouth firmly shut right now. But sadly the Cheney admin never believed in doing the right thing.
Stipulating that Bush broke the law would certainly make things clearer: If Bush broke the law, then ____________. Ooh, the possibilities are juicy.
I realize that some internet folks have set themselves up as authorities on this: some guy named Glenn and a progressive website. But I dunno if they're any more authoritative than say, Newsmax or World Net Daily. What I do know is Jamie Gorelick's testimony before congress (which I thoughtfully linked) seems OK to me---a) that the administration didn't accept congress' authority to limit intelligence gathering on foreign threats and b) such intelligence is gathered not for evidence per the 4th Amendment, but just to get a clue on what the hell's going on out there.
My wanderings about the internet suggest that the 1995 rewrite of FISA was actually a response to the fear that Aldrich Ames' lawyers would seek dismissal of the charges on 4th Amendment grounds because Clinton's DOJ didn't have warrants when they gathered the evidence against him, not over executive-legislative constitutional questions about privacy. If that sheds any light.
But altho I like the show, I don't really enjoy playing Law & Order, which is debate and yes, sophistry. I work with lawyers (headhunter) and know that if they didn't disagree on the law, there would never be trials. And I've seen enough incompetence on the part of the pros that for we amateurs to jump in is ludicrous. (I will note for the record that the Truong decision, altho begun pre-FISA [1978] seems to have been decided in 1980 contemplating FISA. Also there's something current out there called In re: Sealed Case that the pro-Bushies suggest gives him a total pass. But what do I know?)
Regardless, it's either the Supreme Court or an impeachment proceding that's going to be the final word. That the same constitution was taken to both permit and ban racial segregation tells me that laws are written in sand more than in stone, and it's why I try not to be a cementhead about them.
"Broke"? "Law"? The definitions game certainly descends to sophistry, and I really try to avoid it. But I don't mind playing amateur philosopher because you don't need a license, and it's attempted far less frequently: Is it a crime to disobey an illegal law? Is it moral to observe the letter of the law, even if such conscientiousness might let people die?
This is where I live, rilke. I do object to running legality and "the right thing" together, as if they're synonymous. They are often anything but, because the law is always insufficient for the exigencies of the human condition. Surely any of us would run a red light to get our child to the hospital.
I've lost a good grip on the details here, but just wanted to make a suggestion about this whole debate, and ones like it.
The details, of course, will determine who's right here, but to some extent I think folks roughly on my side of this issue are lining up there because--even though we're not experts and all the details aren't in yet--we've come to distrust this administration. They've played fast and loose with the facts, with reasoning, and with the law in the past, and we're tired of it. They may be right in this case, but they've been wrong and acted unjustly so many times in the past that some of us don't even really care whether they can eak out some contorted legal justification for this one. It's part of a very bad pattern, and will remain so even if it turns out to be plausibly legal. And they've done wrong so many times on so many different issues that, by induction, we've just come to expect that they're probably dirty here, too.
I feel you, man. My dad still feels that way about Roosevelt.
Really.
the goal could have been accomplished within fisa
Only the stated goal...
Oh, for the days when the right was frothing over 500 paper FBI files held in the White House by a low-level staffer!
With double standards, anything is possible...
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