Bush may fall afoul of the law of unintended consequences

Not that anyone has noticed, but we are in a humdinger of a constitutional crisis. For those of you who did not spend part of your college years glued to a television in the Student Union watching the Irvin Committee hearings, and reading the Washington Post, a constitutional crisis is when the President of the United States decides to forget about the Constitution he has sworn to “preserve, protect and defend.”

Constitutional contretemps pepper the pages of our history. They only become crises when the president acts without popular support. And President Bush’s contentions that he can direct the National Security Agency to spy on whomever it pleases, that secret prisons, torture, and suspension of habeas corpus for American citizens are all acceptable weapons in the war on terrorism have very little support, in Congress or in the general population. Hence, the crisis.

John Dean’s assertion that the President admitted to an impeachable offense when he said he had approved unwarranted eavesdropping on communication in which at least one of the communicants was outside the country has not gained a lot of traction, but now that it has been revealed that no such niceties have been observed and the NSA has listened in on thousands of Americans talking within the country, we have the more lethal error, an attempted cover-up.

That, combined with the lame justification for unwarranted intrusions upon our privacy offered by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, and the President stands more exposed than anyone since Richard Nixon. Gonzales’s justification is that the Justice Department’s case was too weak to justify a warrant. This is justice by witchcraft, not by law. What’s next? Smelling out malefactors, or submitting them to the water test in which the innocent float while the guilty sink?

There are some short-sighted people about who say, “so what? I have nothing to hide. Why should I care if the government listens in on my conversations?” If that is as far as it goes, I would be tempted to agree. But, consider this to be a slippery slope. If the president and NSA are allowed to listen in on anybody, how long will it be before law enforcement agencies from the FBI to the local constable feel justified in doing the same thing? And, if they can listen, a form of search, without warrants, how long before they seize without warrants?

Ill-conceived anti-drug laws have already led to the destruction of a number of houses based on faulty information and judges who are too much in favor of law and order to adequately safeguard the constitutional protection from unreasonable search and seizure. The Rico Statutes have been suborned to be little more than money-raising opportunities for police forces. What is to prevent a sheriff’s deputy or cop from kicking in your door in the middle of the night out of animus or revenge for some slight?

As with all ill-considered, not to say bonehead plays, President Bush is likely to accomplish precisely the opposite of what he set out to. We are not talking making the country safe from terrorists. That is pap for the rubes. What Bush and Cheney set out to do was to recapture powers Cheney thinks were wrongly stripped from the presidency in the aftermath of Watergate. What is likely to occur is that the presidency will be more constrained than ever before, just as it was after Nixon. Since Republican Congressional leaders are just as angry as their Democratic colleagues, Mr. Bush is going to have a hard time fending off attacks. The wolf cry of attacks on America is already wearing thin. The only thing worse for the administration would be a real attack. That would spell the end of the Bush administration.

Tom Gordon

tsg0008@sbcGlobal.net