Pruning Shears

Kit Bond is this week’s tyranny enabler:

Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo., said Monday he wants Congress to grant immunity to telecommunications companies that cooperated with the government’s warrantless wiretapping program prior to January 2007.
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Bond said he also wants to expand the law to allow monitoring of all types of foreign communications, and shorten the application process for warrants to eavesdrop on suspect American telephone conversations and e-mails by requiring less detail and expanding the list of federal officials who can approve warrant applications.

I’m not beating a dead horse on this since it’s still alive, but there is absolutely no reason to shield companies that break the law at the President’s request.  We are ruled by the Constitution and not a cult of personality.

I had this one all teed up:

The government’s ability to eavesdrop on terrorism suspects overseas allowed the United States to obtain information that helped lead to the arrests last week of three Islamic militants accused of planning bomb attacks in Germany, Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, told senators on Monday.
But another government official said Mr. McConnell might have misspoken. Mr. McConnell said the information had been obtained under a newly updated and highly contentious wiretapping law, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. But the official, who has been briefed on the eavesdropping laws and the information given to the Germans, said that those intercepts were recovered last year under the old law. The official asked for anonymity because the information is classified.
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Mr. McConnell made his remarks to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

But then the very next day:

In a new embarrassment for the Bush administration top spymaster, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell is withdrawing an assertion he made to Congress this week that a recently passed electronic-surveillance law helped U.S. authorities foil a major terror plot in Germany.

I realize those who testify before Congress have a one week grace period to correct testimony, but representatives of this administration lie under oath before Congress as a matter of course.  They are definitely abusing the privilege, but unless Congress learns to play hardball nothing will come of it.

Speaking of hardball, I’ve got a running email correspondence with Matthew Witemyre, who appears to be a budding radical Constitutional law scholar.  He’s in the camp that says the problems we face right now are because of flaws in the Constitution itself.  In one exchange this week he wrote:

Bush/Cheney’s actions appear to be mostly constitutional.  They are building on some of the bad actions of some of our great (and not so great) presidents; the precedents of Jefferson (LA purchase), Lincoln (denial of habeas corpus),  McKinley (imperial foreign policy), Woodrow Wilson (stifling dissent, blame the opposition as seditious, do whatever the hell we want to do when it comes to foreign policy), FDR (completely reshaped the constitution), and the Nixon/Ford/Reagan/Bush I continuous abortion (Watergate, spying, Iran Contra, use of presidential pardons, if the president does it it’s not against the law, etc.).

Funny enough, shortly after that Digby posted about the concept “Constitutional Hardball”, saying (among other things) that everything Republicans have been doing is Constitutional, it’s just a part of a two-or-three-times-per-century period of trying to change fundamental understandings of how the Constitution works.  Both point toward the same ideas:  What is the Constitution?  How do we understand it?  How has our understanding changed over time?  Does that mutability make the Constitution itself too elastic to be reliable as an even somewhat objective guide?  Matt is much more immersed in studying the law and its history so he’s more qualified to comment, and in any event I see those questions leading quickly to the kind of philosophical reflection that makes my brain hurt (I avoid metaphysics for the same reason).  Having said that, it’s not all abstract theorizing on how many founding fathers can dance on the head of a pin.  We need to be engaged and active, but we also need to hash those issues out as best we can as we go along.