Congressional Research Arm Rebuts Bush on Spying
Tempest in a Teapot? Bunch of Nonsense?
No way.
As I said, it’s illegal surveillance.
Illegal. Illegal. Illegal. (stamp, stamp, and…wait for it…. … … … Stamp!)
The research arm of Congress (The Congressional Research Service) has issued a report concluding that that the administration’s justification for the warrantless eavesdropping authorized by President Bush conflicts with existing law and hinges on weak legal arguments.
This from the Washington Post
The Congressional Research Service’s report rebuts the central assertions made recently by Bush and Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales about the president’s authority to order secret intercepts of telephone and e-mail exchanges between people inside the United States and their contacts abroad.
The 44-page report said that Bush probably cannot claim the broad presidential powers he has relied upon as authority to order the secret monitoring of calls made by U.S. citizens since the fall of 2001. Congress expressly intended for the government to seek warrants from a special Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court before engaging in such surveillance when it passed legislation creating the court in 1978, the CRS report said.
The report also concluded that Bush’s assertion that Congress authorized such eavesdropping to detect and fight terrorists does not appear to be supported by the special resolution that Congress approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, which focused on authorizing the president to use military force.
“It appears unlikely that a court would hold that Congress has expressly or impliedly authorized the NSA electronic surveillance operations here,” the authors of the CRS report wrote.
Unless of course it’s a Supreme Court that put him in office (with judicial activism never before seen). Now that Roberts has been added, we will see a real fight over Alito.
Another juicy snippet:
Some law professors have been skeptical of the president’s assertions, and several said yesterday that the report’s conclusions were expected. “Ultimately, the administration’s position is not persuasive,” said Carl W. Tobias, a University of Richmond law professor and an expert on constitutional law.
“Congress has made it pretty clear it has legislated pretty comprehensively on this issue with FISA,” he said, referring to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. “And there begins to be a pattern of unilateral executive decision making. Time and again, there’s the executive acting alone without consulting the courts or Congress.”
3 thoughts on “Congressional Research Arm Rebuts Bush on Spying”
The report states that “President Bush probably cannot use the argument that he has the authority” that doesn’t exactly strike me as a very confident finding for a report that is no doubt going to be used by a bunch of over zealous Senators during any one of a number of hearings into the so called illegal wiretap and electronic eavesdropping.
I would expect a report that is supposed to be damning against the President’s authorizing of the NSA to conduct warrant less wiretaps should in fact contain language like ” under no circumstances can we find that the President can authorize this kind of actions”
To me that means that they know for a fact that it is possible that the Presidents assertion that he has the authority to authoize the NSA to carry out the warrant less wiretaps and he did.
They can only conclude likelihood, since they are the research arm of Congress rather than the judicial branch. My interpretation is that the President is on very shaky ground, since this is not a partisan group. What the report does, in fact, is give ammo for investigation.
How you get from that “they know for a fact it is possible” or that they would have any reason to state differently than what they would know for a fact is a little beyond me, but as always, you’re entitled to your own reading.
I don’t doubt many people think he is on shaky ground, but that is far from calling his authorization illegal. I still whole heartily feel that President Bush felt the the War on Terror and keeping us safe after 9/11 gave him the authorization and I do however accept that you and other disagree with that. This is truly what makes our country great and it would be a very sad day when we as Americans cannot debate this and other topics in an opeb forum such as this.