Talking Circles Around Himself

In the past weeks Bush has made two contradictory arguments about spying and the Patriot Act. On the one hand, Bush has defended the Patriot Act on the grounds that “we must have the tools necessary to protect the American people”. By this argument, it is vital to have the specific, congressionally delegated authority for a number of domestic anti-terrorism initiatives. On the other hand, when criticized even by some of his own party’s senators for authorizing the National Security Agency (NSA) to spy on international calls, the president said ‘the authority to bypass the court derived from the Constitution and Congress' vote authorizing the use of military force after the 2001 terror attacks.’ (That Congressional vote was the vaguely worded bill passed in a rush a week after 9/11.) These two arguments don’t add up and here’s why:

To be clear, Bush is arguing that he now can grant the NSA a spying authority that bypasses even the shadowy Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) courts, created in 1978 for the explicit purpose of granting the government ‘foreign surveillance’ rights on a case by case basis. They grant secret surveillance warrants on terms far more favorable to the government than normal courts with no possibility of the surveilled defending his rights in FISA. Indeed, the FISA courts are so willing to favor the government over civil rights that in 2004 these courts denied none of the 1758 applications for secret surveillance, and apparently have denied only one spying warrant in their history. In this light, Bush’s personal authorization of the NSA to bypass these courts has been such an abuse of executive authority that today one of the members of the FISA court resigned in protest, objecting even to the permissiveness of the FISA courts themselves.

So, taking a step back, Bush is arguing that the Patriot Act is necessary because he needs those legal ‘tools’, but that if he doesn’t have those ‘tools’, he still has the legal authority to do basically whatever he likes. That’s contradictory – he doesn’t need the Patriot Act if he already has the power by the post-9/11 Congressional vote, and if he needs the Patriot Act then he is admitting he doesn’t have unlimited authority to do what he deems necessary. While some enjoy pointing out our president’s verbal mishaps, this is no slip of the tongue. It’s an unjustified expansion of executive powers by any means. Bush should not be allowed to bypass those FISA courts (which shouldn’t exist in the first place), and he shouldn’t have the powers granted under the Patriot Act. The president is abusing the powers he has, and there is no good reason for him to have them in the first place.