Yesterday the Senate passed a bill authorizing warrantless wiretapping on domestic/foreign communications. It's one of those things that makes you cock your head and say, "Huh?"
Hasn't it been one of the bones of contention that the Bush administration unconstitutionally did warrantless wiretapping, ignoring FISA? Wasn't this one of the grounds for impeachment that almost nobody had the guts to support? And now the Senate hands Bush permission to do what he was doing illegally before. It will be impossible to hold him to account for this wrongdoing now that the Senate has okayed it.
It is also one step -- a substantial step -- off the path and onto the slippery slope. For now it's limited to foreign communications. How much longer before it's domestic? A silly question, really: it's already been practiced domestically, and now with permission to tap foreign communications it will be so easy for them to invoke the same logic when it's revealed again that domestic wiretapping is still going on.
Didn't I wonder aloud in a recent blog which civil liberties the Bush administration was after next?
A second part of this is that lots of Democratic lawmakers went along with this bill, saying that they didn't want to look soft on terror. An immediate problem comes up: the American people sent them to Washington, DC to tell Bush and Buddies that we're tired of this game. And now the newbies are already wrapped up in it. What kind of backroom pressures are being put on them so that they violate the trust of the citizens who sent them there?
When lawmakers say that they don't want to appear this way or that, what they're saying is that they're afraid for their images. They're not voting on principle; they're voting on how it looks so that they can get reelected. This has been one of the biggest problems with the whole war on terror: Bush and Co defined the terms of this landscape, and anybody who responds to it is playing the game by the rules the Administration laid down. Once you step foot into the game the Administration is already in control. You're playing their game.
We know from oodles of research on children that bullies are operating out of a fear of personal powerlessness. They are preemptively aggressive so that nobody questions their fears. And the fears never get addressed. Why don't we apply this to adults? To politicians who display preemptive aggression? Does human nature change from childhood to adulthood? Nope. Not like that.
When we say that national security is the preeminent issue, then insecurity is the problem. Are we going to solve it by focusing on terrorists we can't see Somewhere Out There? Nope. And when the majority of Americans are trying to tell the top elected officials that we don't like their insecurity anymore, of course they respond in the way they know how: to be aggressive.
How do we deal with childhood bullies? We know a lot from the research. It's time to use it on the adults who are behaving just the same. Before more people die in a war based on insecurity. Before we lose more civil liberties because our 'leaders' harbor unacknowledged fears.
America is better than that.
