A Pilgrim’s Digression

There are two good op-eds today at OpinionJournal.com, the online editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. Both are must-reads.

The first, titled Thank You For Wiretapping seeks to defend the powers the President has taken unto himself to spy on “suspected terrorists” making overseas calls from America, or “suspected terrorists” making calls to America. I put suspected terrorists in scare quotes because I think those words have become the equivalent of what “suspected communist” meant during the Cold War. We know for a fact that American citizens have been wrongly suspected of terrorist sympathies (see the recent case of University of Florida professor Sami Al-Arian), so I do not concede that suspecting someone of terrorism justifies circumventing normal due process.

The Journal editorial author makes a Constitutional argument for the President assuming control of the nation’s security in time of war, but he does so by basically asserting what the President said he resented yesterday: that in time of war, the President can and indeed must assume to himself the powers of dictator in order to “secure” the country.

In a diatribe against Congress, the Editor writes that “What we really have here is a perfect illustration of why America’s Founders gave the executive branch the largest measure of Constitutional authority on national security. They recognized that a committee of 535 talking heads couldn’t be trusted with such grave responsibility.”

That statement seems a little odd, since the Founders did in fact trust Congress with the power to make war. I don’t see how any inference can be made that they therefore distrusted Congress with the power to prosecute war.

Indeed, I am no Constitutional scholar, but from a simple reading of the Constitution I would say that the Congress was granted far more power in matters of war than the President. See Article I, section 8 for the war time powers explicitly granted to Congress, beginning “To declare war…” and going on for about six lines. Among other things, Congress has the power “To make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces.” McCain “torture bill,” anyone?

By contrast, the much-referenced Article II of the Constitution only states that “The President shall be commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several states, when called into the actual service of the United States.” From that, Conservatives derive the right of the President to circumvent the laws of the land in order to spy on American citizens? Talk about your activist judges.

The Constitution can be found here, for anyone who cares to reference it.

What seems to be fast approaching is an argument in this country over whether we are to be ruled by one man, even if he is elected, or a Congress of elected Representatives. It’s a debate that would have been familiar to the ancient Romans.

Much of the argument for unrestrained Executive Power seems to be based on the “immediacy” of the threat to our “freedom.” Writing for the Journal, the editor intones that “As we learned on 9/11, acting with dispatch can be a matter of life and death.” This argument is simply another branch of the poison tree whose root is the premise “Everything changed on 9/11.” Everything changed on 9/11 because we changed it. The terrorists didn’t change anything. We did.

We allowed our government more power via the unnecessary Patriot Act—unnecessary because the President argues that the Constitution already grants him all the powers that the Patriot Act makes explicit. We took a war against Al Qaeda that began as a just revenge for 9/11 and turned it into an unethical and irrational preemptive war in Iraq. And now we have a War on Terror the Journal editors concede will last for decades, a war in which powers granted the President will not be willingly laid down by this or any future Executive (even by a Democrat), a war that serves one primary purpose: the extenuation of government power ever deeper into the lives of Americans in the name of security.

I am utterly baffled that it is Conservatives behind this war, Conservatives who have traditionally distrusted government and struggled against the tentacles with which it strangles freedom. Conservatives who have always been wary of the kind of foreign entanglements George Washington warned against. Conservatives, one of whose icons, Dwight Eisenhower, warned us to fear the encroaching power of the military industrial complex. Conservatives who worship the knight on the white horse whom we were once taught to mistrust.

In the second OpinionJournal article Hitting the Wall, of which I will only write briefly, Brendan Miniter opines that in the War on Terror we have hit “the wall of self-doubt.” The war needs a second wind, he writes, without explaining how that wind might begin to blow.

Also responding to recent criticisms that the Executive Branch is too powerful for the good of the country, Miniter states that “This war will not last forever,” and that “we can delegate the power to go after them [the terrorists]—no matter where they originate their phone calls—without losing the freedoms that make this country worth fighting for.” Can we?

When I hear Americans on call-in shows talking about all the freedom they would gladly cede to the President, if only he will keep them safe, the freedoms of which they speak are already being forfeited. The truth is, like a dog that has been tied outdoors with a chain all its life, Americans don’t really want much freedom: they merely want a longer chain and a master to feed them and keep them safe.