Jun 21 2008

Behind the FISA Outrage

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Dignity.

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The Rights of Man, or as Jefferson put it:  

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

These rights are not bestowed by governments or politicians. These rights are not theirs to give and take.

These unalienable rights are what make all men and women more than serfs and chattel to the Ruling Class. These rights are the difference between a free people and a servile people cowering in fear at the whims of their faceless rulers and governments.

These rights are not granted by governments, they are ours. They cannot grant them….but they can pass laws and take actions that take them away. A Congress just did. As the President did before them…by secretly spying on the free citizens of our representative democracy. These rights are not theirs to take or even to abridge. They are stealing from us.

This country was founded specifically to establish these rights. For two hundred and thirty years Americans have fought and died for these rights. Generation after generation these rights have been defended to the death against foreign powers, foreign TYRANTS who would take them away. Blood has been spilled, lives have been sacrificed, children have been orphaned for these rights. These rights are what America is.

And now they are being willingly surrendered by those who We The People elected to protect them. For no good reason.

Fighting for civil and constitutional rights, at every possible opportunity, is much much more than fighting against any particular law. It is the fight for Human Dignity, the fight for the individual, the fight for freedom from the historically inevitable totalitarian urges of those who hold power.

To some, to those who cannot understand the outrage and ‘hysteria,’ this is just another bad bill. To those who value freedom and dignity, it is just the latest assault on our rights by a government that has come to serve itself, not those who elected it to power….a bill that serves their interests, covers their asses, serves their corporate donors…. not the interests of The People.

When such a self-serving flimsy excuse as this is used to abridge the rights…and thus the freedom and dignity…of an ostensibly free people, there WILL be outrage.

As the bumper sticker so succinctly says: If you are NOT outraged, you are not paying attention.

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  1. Photobucket

    • aakks on June 21, 2008 at 20:23
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    While supporting Obama in the primaries, one of the votes I always, always pointed to was the fisa vote where he voted correctly and Clinton skipped the vote. That was a big deal to me.

    This “compromise” is the aumf of civil liberties, and Obama is on the wrong side.

  3. And now they are being willingly surrendered by those who We The People elected to protect them. For no good reason.

    There is no good reason to have passed this bill.  I am getting pretty sick and tired of hearing “we need tools,” as though our right to privacy and the human dignity that is served by it is somehow disposable, in the face of a fix-it on the cheap kind of construction job.

    I think Hunter put it well today, but still too many folks are unwilling to be critical of Obama on this issue, and that’s out of plain fear, to win at all costs, even if we lose everything in the bargain.

    • Edger on June 21, 2008 at 20:35
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    And now they are being willingly surrendered by those who We The People elected to protect them.

    Why are those who elected “those who We The People elected to protect them” willingly surrendering to the in your face insults and allowing these rights to be “willingly surrendered by those who We The People elected to protect them”

    ?

    • geomoo on June 21, 2008 at 20:36
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    Protect our country?  What value is a fascist country of trembling cowards?  Worse than nothing.  And if that country used to be America, land of the brave and home of the free, then I would rather see us all blown up than live to see us squander our hard-won inheritance.

    This stuff is not even complicated, yet confusion reigns.

    It is time for serious resistance.

  6. These rights that are not even ours to compromise. They are human rights which have been hard won, from earlier then the Magna Carta to the framing of our Constitution and beyond to now.  To take them away for the inherent rights of a king or president because we need protection from some cooked up ever present boogie man, means we cease to have any rights. The power and the laws become one. What I want to know is whose going to protect us from them?  

  7. I got outraged when

    Pelosi took impeachment off the table

    The Democratic Congress voted to fund the war – how many times has it been now?

    The Dems (including my newly elected Senator Klobuchar) voted to pass the FISA extension the first time.

    I won’t say I’ve totally given up on electoral politics. As I’ve said many times, its the only triage we have right now. But once I accepted the fact that the king stay the king, I started looking in another direction for the answers and the outrage meter doesn’t get ramped up so high these days. Perhaps that’s not a good thing, but its where I’m at.

  8. buhdy.

    (And everyone else)

    If we’re honest here, we have to say that the major decisions have always been out of the hands of the people. And that we’ve always been fed lies. We can elect a new politician, like we always do. But that will leave the power structures intact, untouched. And when Obama fails to measure up, we’ll move on to the next candidate, who will also fail to change the system itself.

    So. What’s it gonna take to learn this lesson, which was learned by some 150 years ago: that the state is the executive committee of the ruling class, that the two “parties” are just two factions of the same party, that the real party rests not with the parties or elections but with the corporations?

    What’s it gonna take to make you break with the Democrats?

    Cause, I gotta tell ya, it doesn’t get much worse or much more obvious than it is now.

  9. . . . the real power rests not with the parties or elections but with the corporations.

    Sorry. Can’t fuckin type to save my life.

  10. Not being a regular poster here, just a lurker, I want to be clear that I voted for Obama, will vote for Obama, and don’t blame him for this whole mess. However, in trying to make sense of what is going on, I found that Jack Balkin has interesting post @ Balkinization:

    Why Obama Kinda Likes the FISA Bill (But He Won’t Come Out and Say It)

    Most Americans don’t realize that the FISA compromise comes in two parts. The first part greatly alters FISA by expanding the executive’s ability to wiretap and engage in much broader searches of communications than were permissible under the law before. It essentially gives congressional blessing to some but not all of what the executive was doing under President Bush. President Obama will like having Congress authorize these new powers. He’ll like it just fine. People aren’t paying as much attention to this part of the bill. But they should, because it will define the law of surveillance going forward. It is where your civil liberties will be defined for the next decade.

    Part II, by contrast, is the part that everyone has gotten up in arms about. It creates effective immunity for telecom companies. It makes perfect sense for Obama to criticize this part of the bill. That’s because he doesn’t need it as much as he needs the first part, and his base really really dislikes it. True, it might be nice to have retroactive immunity for the players who he will be working with in the future. But remember, he expects to be President, and he figures that his OLC and Justice Department can offer sufficient assurances of legality going forward based on the changes in the first part of the bill.

    For those who don’t click on the Balkinization link in the blog roll, Jack Balkin is:

    Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment

    Director, The Information Society Project at Yale Law School

    The front page includes what promises to be a long discussion of FISA  by David Kris, who served at the DOJ from 2000 to 2003. I’m plowing through this for clues on just how pissed I should be. One thing caught my eye in the second link I’ve cited in this paragraph:

    Second, it now appears that Congress simply (and unfortunately) doesn’t care that the Administration’s (secret) legal justification was implausible, nor does it care that the Executive branch treated the legislature (and its statutory enactments) with contempt. Republican Senators, including Roberts and Hagel, yesterday negotiated a “deal” with the White House for legislation that would actually authorize warrantless, virtually unlimited surveillance of Americans.

    I’m booking marking that one for the next time someone on a liberal board writes how cool it might be to have Hagel in an Obama administration or one heart beat away.

    I hope that these links can bring some light to your discussion. Thx.

  11. it’s okay. just laugh it off.

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