Legal Commentary

Four More Years? Just Say No!

By TChris

John McCain admits that he doesn't understand much about economics. It's time for him to make the same concession when it comes to constitutional law.

A top adviser to Senator John McCain says Mr. McCain believes that President Bush’s program of wiretapping without warrants was lawful, a position that appears to bring him into closer alignment with the sweeping theories of executive authority pushed by the Bush administration legal team.

In a letter posted online by National Review this week, the adviser, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, said Mr. McCain believed that the Constitution gave Mr. Bush the power to authorize the National Security Agency to monitor Americans’ international phone calls and e-mail without warrants, despite a 1978 federal statute that required court oversight of surveillance.

McCain might want to double-check the validity of his beliefs by reading the Constitution. He should start with the Fourth Amendment. Then he should peruse the rest of the document in a fruitless search for a presidential exception to the Warrant Clause. He might also hazard a glance at Article I, which grants law-making powers to Congress, and at Article II, section 3, which requires the president to "take care that the laws be faithfully executed" -- even laws the president doesn't like. (more ...)

Like others who embrace and extend the dubious "unitary executive" theory to argue that the president is above the law, McCain has a sorry grasp of the Constitution's function: to protect individuals from the tyranny of an all-powerful ruler. If McCain hopes to be elected to an Imperial Presidency, voters need to understand that he represents four more years of lawlessness, four more years of the abusive exercise of presidential power, four more years of freedom lost.

Full post as published by TalkLeft on June 06, 2008 (boomark / email).