Ted Rall gets it, Kevin Drum doesn’t

Before Christmas, Washington Monthly’s Kevin Drum once again descended into his nice-guy soft liberal squishiness.

This time it was over the National Security Agency’s warrantless spying on Americans. While saying it certainly appeared to be illegal, Drum went squishy as to whether it was unconstitutional or not, apparently taking a “police-state light” interpretation of the Fourth Amendment.

Fortunately, people like Ted Rallget it.

Rall lists just who’s been getting spied upon. What’s not to get about the unconstitutionality of actions like this?

So I was barely surprised to hear the big news that Bush had ordered the National Security Agency, FBI and CIA to tap the phones and emails of such dangerously subversive radical Islamist anti-American terrorist groups as Greenpeace, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, the American Indian Movement and the Catholic Workers, without bothering to apply for a warrant. “The Catholic Workers advocated peace with a Christian and semi-communistic ideology,” an agent wrote in an FBI dossier, a man sadly unaware of the passings of J. Edgar Hoover and the Soviet Union.

Apparently, that’s “just” illegal to people like Drum.

Rall notes that, unfortunately, we never fully rolled back the Nixonian imperial presidency.

The return of brazen Nixon-style domestic eavesdropping --it undoubtedly occurred under presidents from Ford to Clinton, though on a smaller, more discreet scale--indicates that the White House is flipping ahead to the next page in its Hitler playbook, the part about exploiting a state of perpetual war to stifle internal dissent on a vast scale.

In reality, it’s arguable that such authority was never intended for the president by the authors of our constitution.

Actually, as Peter Irons documents in his outstanding “War Powers: How the Imperial Presidency Hijacked the Constitution,” the Founding Fathers never intended for the "commander in chief" to have any powers beyond ordering troops to repel an invasion force. As everyone understood in 1787, the title was strictly ceremonial. A president can't declare war, much less violate our privacy, based on his commander-in-chief ”authority.”

Hell, yes, it’s unconstitutional, no matter what quasi-liberal squishy defenders of the theory, at least, of the imperial presidency would say.