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Big brother, robust and strong Monday, Jan 2, 2006 By John Brummett Vice President Dick Cheney, who has been around Washington since the Ford administration, says the presidency has become too wimpish since Richard Nixon's Watergate scandals. He says that he and his boy George W. Bush, aka King George II, are restoring the vital machismo. Actually, to be precise, the grim veeper says he favors a "strong and robust" executive authority. So do I. A strong and robust response to Katrina would have been ideal. A strong and robust response to spiraling deficits and strangling debt would be nice. A strong and robust influence internationally that would have won key European alliances before a war was started in Iraq - why, that would have been positively swell. But Cheney's context is narrow. He refers to the president's telling his National Security Agency to wiretap domestic phones without getting a probable-cause warrant from a secret court set up for that very purpose by a 1978 reform. Cheney says a president needs that arbitrary authority in order to keep us safe in this crazy modern world. He says the Constitution provided for this very kind of thing. That they didn't have telephones to tap when the Constitution was written - well, you know what he means. Actually, no, I don't. For one thing, eavesdropping strikes me as more creepy than strong. But more to the political point, we have procedures in that 1978 reform for bugging domestic phones engaged in international calls on which we have reason to suspect a national security interest. We have this special secret court, which, in three decades, has hardly ever turned down an administration request for a probable cause warrant. You go to a secret court and get a rubber stamp to spy on somebody. That's quite a bit of arbitrary power, maybe even in the strong and robust category. But the Bush-Cheney administration says it's not enough. It says these terrorists move around, and that time is of the essence. Fine, then. We even have a backup procedure in this 1978 law. The administration, if pressed by emergency, may go ahead and tap a phone, but only so long as it goes to the secret court immediately afterward to report what it's done and receive after-the-fact permission. You tap somebody's phone secretly, then go tell a secret court what you've done. Now there's some serious strength, some sure-enough robustness. But the Bush-Cheney White House says it's not enough. It says the modern terrorist threat requires that it keeps it domestic espionage practices close to its vest and ever-fluid, and that, otherwise, we might have been hit again as we were on 9-11. So, we're down to this in Cheney's world: Under the modern threat, our American presidency needs to be so strong and so robust that it must be trusted to act only nobly and only in our general national interest in spying on whomever it wants in America whenever it wants on whatever basis. A secret court that has acted for three decades as a rubber stamp for probable-cause warrants can no longer be trusted. It makes you wonder just who they're listening to, or who they might next choose to listen to, and just how feeble their reasons must be. The idea to bring all that out in congressional investigations is a splendid one. Strong and robust is one thing. Creepy and abusive is another. ------- John Brummett is an award-winning columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock and author of "High Wire," a book about Bill Clinton's first year as president. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com. |
