Presidents aren’t moral
leaders and don’t even run Washington. Obama has killed people in the line of
duty and is doing things now that he scorned as a Senator 6 years ago. Furthermore,
whistle-blowers as well as the President’s best intentions are driving the
debate. Nevertheless, this may be the right time and Obama may be the right
President to respond finally in a significant way to Dwight Eisenhower’s warnings
about the growth of the security state in his remarkable Farewell
Address of January 1961.
Obama has plenty of political
capital to spend on taming the security state and ending what he’s called
disdainfully the “borderless war on terror.” Far more than he spent boldly in
his first term nationalizing GM and Chrysler, supporting gay marriage, and, by
executive order, creating a path for young illegal immigrants eventually to become
American citizens.
Three and a half years before
his own Farewell Address, Obama has already formally acknowledged that he’s uncomfortable with the emergency powers
he’s inherited. He has set down the warrior mantle that served so many presidents
too well. Now, Obama—with vigorous allies on both the left and right—had better
make sure that he doesn’t end up meekly passing them on to the next president,
whomever that may be.
It is not clear whether Edward Snowden's leaks have compromised US intelligence effectiveness.
(Conceivably, there’s an international terrorist cell out there that actually thought
it was operating outside the reach of US and allied government surveillance.)
What he has done, however, is clear.
We now know what we can’t
un-know: All three pillars of the US constitution—with allied cooperation—have
constructed the necessary technical infrastructure to monitor discreetly all
our associations, and our personal, political, and business utterances.
It is beside the point to say
that the Executive Branch presently is not using this awesome machinery
unilaterally and that Barack Obama is only concerned with potential terrorist
activities. Presidents come and go. And Congress has a terrible record of going
along whenever the Executive invokes national security concerns.
Washington is awash with
people who think they’re at war with political extremism as well as political
terrorism.
The US Constitution wouldn’t
have separated the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government
if the Founding Fathers believed that only prudent, civil people would get
their hands on power. Furthermore, they never envisaged that those three power
centers would only be independent of one another in public, and that in private
they could act as one.
It’s ironic: Obama wins on
the economy and gets a Nobel Prize for peace, a constitutional lawyer
overseeing the creation of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan.
Obviously, Obama will take
his time before responding to Snowden, libertarians, civil rights advocates,
Senator Rand Paul, and probably others. After all, he has to run as well as tame
the security apparatus. Nevertheless,
his government has diminished our freedom to think and associate freely.
Unless he takes action—ideally, along with a decision from the Supreme Court—he will end up legitimizing the accumulation of a rainy day file on
everything we do.
This wouldn’t harm vacuous,
harmless people or their pursuit of happiness. However, those with new things
to say, with grievances, with extreme views and rude opinions would lose their
privacy to the brutes and nervous bureaucrats listening in.
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