By Norman Solomon
It’s now painfully
clear that the president has put out a contract on the Fourth Amendment. And at
the Capitol, the hierarchies of both parties are stuffing it into the trunks of
their limousines, so each provision can be neatly fitted with cement shoes and
delivered to the bottom of the Potomac.
Some other Americans are
on a rescue mission. One of them, Congressman Justin Amash, began a debate on
the House floor Wednesday with a vow to “defend the Fourth Amendment.” That’s
really what his amendment — requiring that surveillance be warranted — was
all about.
No argument for the
Amash amendment was more trenchant than the one offered by South Carolina
Republican Jeff Duncan, who simply read the Fourth Amendment aloud.
To quote those words was
to take a clear side: “The
right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects,
against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no
Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or
affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the
persons or things to be seized.”
Edward Snowden’s heroic
revelations have made it possible for some House members from both parties to
blow away the fog that shrouds so much tap dancing on Capitol Hill. When the
Amash amendment went to the floor, there was no place left to hide.
To their historic shame,
134 Republicans and 83 Democrats voted against Amash’s amendment (while 94
Republicans and 111 Democrats voted for it). That’s how the measure lost,
217-205.
The record of the House vote tells
us a lot. Top Republicans — including Speaker John Boehner, Majority Leader
Eric Cantor and Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy — voted with Obama policies to
keep smothering the Fourth Amendment. So did top Democrats, including Minority
Leader Nancy Pelosi and Minority Whip Steny Hoyer.
The stench at the
pinnacle of GOP power hardly surprises most Democrats. But on civil liberties
— as on so many other profound issues — a similar odor is emanating from the
upper reaches of Democratic power on Capitol Hill, where Pelosi and Hoyer are
far from the only Democrats who have become reflexive servants of indefensible
Obama policies.
Consider some of the
other Democratic luminaries in the House who voted against the Amash amendment:
The Democratic National Committee’s chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz. The
Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s former chair Chris Van Hollen.
The DCCC’s current chair, Steve Israel.
Some of the other
Democrats who voted no on the Amash amendment include progressive-aura
lawmakers like Ami Bera (Calif.), Joaquin Castro (Texas), Luis Gutierrez
(Ill.), Marcy Kaptur (Ohio), Joe Kennedy (Mass.), Annie Kuster (N.H.), Nita
Lowey (N.Y.) and Louise Slaughter (N.Y.)
Deserving special
mention for their deplorable votes against Amash’s amendment are Sheila Jackson
Lee from Houston and Jan Schakowsky from Chicago. Both are vice chairs of the
Congressional Progressive Caucus.
I’ve been critical of
the Progressive Caucus for enabling Obama’s rightward moves by doing scant
pushback. But credit where due: on Wednesday, aside from Jackson Lee and
Schakowsky, the other six officers of the Progressive Caucus and a large
majority of its more than 70 members supported the Amash amendment. Eloquence
in the floor debate came from John Conyers (the lead co-sponsor of the Amash
amendment), Jared Polis, Zoe Lofgren and Jerrold Nadler.
Yet they were no match
for the White House, with its media
spin machine and behind-the-curtain arm twisting.
President Obama has a
firm grip on levers of power, and anyone who thinks that his administration has
been chastened enough to tread more carefully on civil liberties is engaged in
wishful thinking.
While
the House has grown somewhat restive, the Senate has remained notably pliant
for the surveillance state. An egregious — and, for some, surprising —
example is Al Franken, who declared his support for the NSA surveillance program
when news of it broke in early June. “I can assure you, this is not about
spying on the American people,” Franken said. From his Senate office, one press
release after another has
been packed with blather like overstuffed sausages.
Franken is
now saying he’ll
introduce a bill for "transparency" because the public will support
the current surveillance programs if they grasp what’s really involved: “I think that if there were greater transparency,
Americans would have a better understanding of these programs.” Count on transparency to be a
buzzword cloak for more of the same.
Another Democratic
senator, Ron Wyden, has been vastly more candid. At a forum the day before the
Amash amendment vote, Wyden said that for surveillance, as far as the Obama
administration is concerned, “the authority is essentially limitless.”
An ACLU staff
attorney, Alexander Abdo, was driving at the same point when he wrote days
ago: “Perhaps
the most fundamental problem with the NSA’s constitutional theory is that
it has no limit. If the constitution is blind to the collection of our data and
limits only the NSA’s later uses of it, then the NSA truly can ‘collect it all’
now and ask questions later. Our emails, phone calls and internet activities
would all be very simple for the NSA to collect under the NSA’s theory. But it
could go much further. It could put video cameras on every street corner, it
could install microphones in every home and it could even remotely copy the
contents of every computer hard drive.”
All three branches of
the U.S. government are now largely under the control of forces with stunning
contempt for basic legal processes required by the Bill of Rights. Mere words
and mild reforms from members of Congress may mollify the gullible, but only a
direct challenge to the Obama administration’s policies can rise to the level
of the current historic imperative to restore civil liberties in the United
States.
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Norman Solomon is
co-founder of RootsAction.org and founding director of the Institute for Public
Accuracy. His books include “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning
Us to Death.”