by Matt Barr

NSA yes, I say no

The Reason staff had a twisty-turny day with the President and Fox News yesterday. Normally, they're fairly coherent and honest in their criticisms, but yesterday seemed to be a staff holiday from integrity.

Here's one: During a speech at Kansas State University that touched on the NSA domestic spying controversy, President Bush said, "If I wanted to break the law, why was I briefing Congress?"

Fair play to the President. If your intention is to break the law, it's unlikely you'll tell Congress, or really anybody outside your immediate control, you're doing it. Evidence of a clear conscience, that is. Taken for what it's worth, a fair point.

Unless you unaccountably interpret it to mean "it's legal because we 'briefed' Congress," as Nick Gillespie correctly describes the gist of this obtuse Jacob Sullum post entitled "If I Admitted It, It Can't Be Illegal."

First of all, he wasn't "briefing Congress." He was briefing eight members of Congress, and exactly how much they knew about the surveillance is a matter of dispute. They were, in any case, not at liberty to discuss this classified information with anyone else, let alone bring the matter up for a vote.

Accepting this, it's clear we should do away with Congressional oversight of national security altogether. They're completely powerless to do anything about it, right? In Sullum's estimation, it seems the President was briefing "eight members of Congress" specifically so he could use the excuse that if he admitted it, it wasn't illegal. What made this so brilliant was that he picked eight Congresspersons who couldn't go to the rest of Congress or to the press. Dissent stifler!

And the salient difference between "briefing Congress" and "briefing eight members of Congress" eludes me. What constitutes a quorum whereby Congress can be considered briefed, particularly about sensitive national security matters? Setting whatever animus you have for or against the President aside, it's my contention that the fewer Congresspersons involved in actual important stuff the better, anyway.

"If I admitted it, it can't be illegal" is the kind of interpretation of Bush's remark I'd expect from Democratic Underground, not the normally reliable Hit & Run.

Cathy Young similarly slaps around John Gibson on the same subject. She quotes Gibson:

The rule goes like this: Nobody should die because politicians want a judge to dot every i and cross every t....

If the Dems can't beat that argument with something short and to the point -- "It's the Constitution, stupid," "Where is the Fourth Amendment?" something a whole lot better than either of those -- then the Dems just plain lose this argument.

The evil Gibson is saying, here, according to Young, that the Constitution is "a silly argument no one cares about." Further proof is that he also says "It may not fit the parameters of the parchment, but it doesn't mean we don't care about the Constitution or the protections it provides us." After all, he would only say that if he didn't mean it.

What nonsense. The "Fourth Amendment" argument is likely to be ineffective in opposition to the argument that the President is protecting the country from terrorists. But that doesn't yield a blog post; a funny-looking Fox news reader saying the Constitution is silly does.

Say your local public schoolteacher teaches 14 year olds how to correctly use condoms. A bloc of parents object on moral and religious grounds, citing their catechism, their rights as parents and their kids' right not to be exposed to sexual material that young. Is the more effective respose to that "it's the rules that we have to teach them," or something that brings into consideration health, safety, responsibility, STDs, AIDS and unwanted pregnancies?

Evidently, if I suggest "it's the rules" would be the less effective argument, I'm saying rules are silly and no one cares about them.

What makes this even more a head shaker is that that's not the Democrats' argument, they're pretty relentless about making it out to be about unlimited Presidential power and how no one wants George W. Bush flouting the law whenever he feels like it because who knows what he'll do next? I can understand Young being upset if the Democrats were relying on an "it's the Fourth Amendment!" argument and no one cared, that would be kind of unsettling. If not unexpected.

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