OPINION:
Invoking the Constitution is the common rhetoric of many politicians who swore to follow and defend it, but a lot of them have obviously never read it, or if they have, didn’t understand it. The Founding Fathers wrote it in plain English, simple enough for even a lawyer to understand, but some politicians nevertheless have trouble with it.
Some are honest about their disagreement with the Founders. Some Democrats want to restrict First Amendment protections to their friends and supporters and would amend the Constitution if necessary to do it. Others argue that the document doesn’t really mean what it says, but what they believe it should say. The Supreme Court — all lawyers trained in the art of the loophole — has been guilty of this over the past six decades. Others simply ignore the Constitution. The current occupant of the White House falls into this category.
Just as dangerous are those who pick and choose parts of it to ignore or belittle. If the vote on Tuesday to end a filibuster to kill the USA Freedom Act is an indication, most Republicans in the Senate have fallen into this category.
A version of the bill, which attempts to circumscribe or impose limits on the National Security Agency’s ability to collect metadata on just about every telephone call and email, passed the House with overwhelming bipartisan support earlier this year. It was an attempt to pull such practices into compliance with the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
During the debate in the House the national security hawks argued that restrictions on surveillance practices would invite disaster because the program foils terrorist plots, and had foiled a few already. The NSA later conceded that what it had said was not necessarily so. Finally the Obama administration and the director of National Intelligence admitted that the House provisions would not interfere with the ability of NSA to track down terrorists. Now come revelations that many analysts within the NSA questioned the effectiveness of the program, and had feared for a long time that if what the agency was really up to became public knowledge, there would be a furious backlash.
Governments have always used “national security” to justify assaults on the liberties of its citizens. Our own government has tried to frighten everyone to obtain power and authority it didn’t need, but power and authority to make its job easier. The “lone wolf” terrorist can be a genuine threat, but skeptics and critics of the USA Freedom Act have cited this ghostly wolf to justify a program that was neither designed nor seems especially useful in locating the wolf. The program was meant to enable the agency to track terrorists through their contacts with other terrorists or terrorist organizations here or abroad by “connecting the dots.” The “lone wolf” by definition isn’t part of a terrorist network, and is unlikely to be discovered by monitoring everybody’s telephone calls and email exchanges.
The phony “national security” argument nevertheless worked. Forty-one Republicans and one Democrat in the Senate decided that “national security” claims, no matter how far-fetched, trumps the rights guaranteed by the Constitution, and defeated the filibuster. The bad law is preserved.
The Constitution is not a smorgasbord. The First, Second and Fourth Amendments, along with the checks and balances and separation of powers that make up the main body of the document, matter and are all related. If this week’s vote was a test, most of the Republicans in the current Senate flunked. The new Senate to be sworn in with the new year will get another chance to get it right. The senators must do better next time.
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