He was a Virginia slave owner when he wrote the words that would create the United States, and eventually help end slavery:
“All men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights . . . that to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
Those were Thomas Jefferson’s words, and that was the Declaration of Independence. That led to the Constitution under which we govern ourselves.
Two hundred and thirty years later, U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor, a descendant of slaves, rebuked the President of the United States for a clandestine eavesdropping program that she found to be both illegal and unconstitutional:
“We must first note that the Office of the Chief Executive has itself been created, with its powers, by the Constitution. “There are no hereditary Kings in America and no powers not created by the Constitution,” she wrote.
President Bush exceeded those powers, and violated the guarantees of free speech and privacy, by ordering secret electronic surveillance without a warrant.
That’s something he did even though he could have asked the secret the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court, or FISA court, to approve his wiretaps. In the past, FISA courts have almost always let presidents bug whomever they wished to bug.
Even the President is not above the law, she said. Suddenly, I felt as though I had gone back in time, to 1974. when I was young and thin. But the issue was very much the same.
We had a President who thought the laws didn’t apply to him, that he could defy a government subpoena to turn over taped records of his conversations. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously that he was wrong, and that this is a government of laws, not men. Within days, that President was no longer president.
Now, we are facing a similar situation with a case that began in Michigan, where some of those under secret surveillance live.
Some of them look like the men who brought terror and death on September 11. Some may even be sympathetic to them. But in our system, everybody, from Mother Teresa to Mohammed Atta, is entitled to the due process of law.
This battle will go on, of course, all the way to the Supreme Court. But before it gets there, President Bush, who is not a lawyer, might do well to read the words of another former Republican governor of a western state, a man who was one.
His name was Earl Warren, and he went on to become one of the greatest chief justices in Supreme Court history. “Implicit in the term national defense is the notion of defending those values and ideas which set this nation apart,” he said. “It would indeed be ironic if, in the name of national defense, we would sanction the subversion of those liberties which make the defense of the nation worthwhile.”
I hope this ruling will stop the cheerleading and support for Bush's myopic nationalism which not only threatens our domestic freedoms here on this soil but creates havoc for others on thier turf...
Posted by: Thrasher | August 19, 2006 at 11:08 AM