In his speech last month on the future of U.S. anti-terror efforts, President Barack Obama covered a lot of ground: the use of drones, the detention and prosecution of enemy combatants, even the controversial investigations of journalists who reported national-security information leaked to them.
Among the words he didn’t mention: “phone,” “warrant,” “Verizon,” and “all records.”
But those words are in the news now, thanks to a court order obtained and reported by London’s Guardian newspaper. Verizon is under a secret court order to hand over information — including “location data, call duration, unique identifiers, and the time and duration of all calls” — about all telephone calls over its system in which at least one party is in the U.S. This is no narrow collection of records for suspected terrorists, but the broadest net possible.
Is this case anything like the Justice Department’s seizure of months of phone records for multiple Associated Press journalists? Does it have anything in common with the IRS’s extra scrutiny of conservative groups?
Yes: In none of these cases does our federal government acknowledge any constraints on its power. The very relationship between the government and its citizens is at issue.
But these problems did not begin yesterday, and they are not limited to a few agencies — or one party. They are the latest symptoms of a vast, general decrease in limits on federal power, one that must be stopped.
These latest overreaches are of a piece with a federal government that tells college campuses how to police sexual harassment, decides which local transportation projects can be built with gas taxes local motorists paid, and essentially touches almost every aspect of Americans’ lives in some form or fashion.
This is not what our Founders intended. But it began developing not long after the nation’s founding and has accelerated over the past 100 years.
The tendency of virtually everything in nature is to expand until it meets an externally placed limit. Vines grow until someone cuts them. Those in power seek more power, until someone stops them from taking it.
If power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, it stands to reason that growth of power necessarily means growth of corruption. If our federal government is to perform its proper roles well and morally, it must do less, not ever more.
Worst, news like the Guardian’s report isn’t new. It has been going on for years — seven years, according to Sen. Saxby Chambliss of Georgia.
Chambliss, as you know, is a Republican. So was the president seven years ago, George W. Bush. The law that gives the federal government this surveillance authority was passed in 1978, introduced by Sen. Ted Kennedy and signed by President Jimmy Carter — Democrats, of course. It was amended by the Patriot Act, which passed in the wake of 9/11 with huge, bipartisan majorities in Congress and was reauthorized in 2011 by a GOP-held House and Democrat-controlled Senate.
For Democrats to profess shock that the Obama administration has been doing this, or for Republicans to express disgust at something that began well before Obama entered the White House, is foolish. At best.
The Constitution establishes the limits our federal government won’t observe otherwise. It’s high time both parties got truly serious about it.
