The Rule of Law
As to be expected this issue has become a partisan circus with plenty of rhetoric, exaggerations and lies to go around on both sides. Millions if not billions of words have already been written in the blogosphere about this issue, so I don't want to spend a lot of time providing redundant analysis, but I do want to comment on the importance of the "Rule of Law" on which the whole of civilization rests, let alone our democracy.
Regardless of one's political stripes or view of the War, one should be able to see that getting answers to the questions raised by this program is important enough to the American people to minimally warrant at least an investigatation by the Senate Intelligence Committe. Unless I am mistaken this is still a government "of the people, for the people and by the people." Please remember that the government can perform surveillance for 72 hours before getting the FISA warrants so any insinuation that opposition to the program is a threat to national security is overstated. Secondly, for the sake of argument, lets assume that government should have the right to perform warantless surveillance. If so, the administration should seek to overturn the existing law or get a temporary exclusion from the current law. But to simply allow any adminstration or goverment agency to willfully ignore the law is too dangerous a precedent to allow.
As I have said, this has expectedly turned into a partisan issue but it is still striking to realize that Republican Senators are more loyal to their party than to the idea of checks and balances in government, to the idea of an independent Congress. They are effectively curtailing their own powers and importance at the threat of displeasing the White House.
On the other hand, Christopher Hitchens, a vocal proponent of the War in Iraq, showing that it is possible to support the War and still oppose illegal wire tapping, has has signed on as a defendant in an ACLU suit being brought against the program. But alas there are not too many public examples that kind of independent thinking.
Anyway, the whole point of this post is to point out that the "Rule of Law" is more important than partisan politics and that I recently came across an excellent expression of this sentiment in the following excerpt from Robert Bolt's "A Man for all Seasons" about Sir Thomas More which I discovered on the http://www.dailydoubt.blogspot.com blog:
Wife: Arrest him!
More: For what?
Wife: He's dangerous!
Roper: For all we know he's a spy!
Daughter: Father, that man's bad!
More: There's no law against that!
Roper: There is, God's law!
More: Then let God arrest him!
Wife: While you talk he's gone!
More: And go he should, if he were the Devil himself, until he broke the law!
Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!
More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
Roper: Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!
More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down - and you're just the man to do it - do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's
sake!
- A Man for All Seasons, Act 1: Scene 6 by Robert Bolt
Brilliant. If that were not enough how about these two excerpts from President George Washington's Farewell Address:
"If, in the opinion of the people, the distribution or modification of the constitutional powers (checks and balances) be in any particular wrong, let it be corrected by an amendment in the way which the Constitution designates. But let there be no change by usurpation; for though this, in one instance, may be the instrument of good, it is the customary weapon by which free governments are destroyed. The precedent must always greatly overbalance in permanent evil any partial or transient benefit, which the use can at any time yield." George Washington - Farewell Address
"The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one, and thus to create, whatever the form of government, a real despotism. A just estimate of that love of power, and proneness to abuse it, which predominates in the human heart, is sufficient to satisfy us of the truth of this position." George Washington - Farewell Address
Good stuff, particulary when you consider that Washington was not considered intellectual when compared to the other founding fathers . Compare the complexity those passages to what you might hear from our modern day politicians.
posted by Alan at 2:49 AM | Permalink |
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