Because it's so easy to forget, and our esteemed media are more concerned with bullshit like the Ford funeral, here's Dahlia Lithwick with a list of The Bill of Wrongs: The 10 Most Outrageous Civil Liberties Violations of 2006." I liked the way this one was written:
5. Government Snooping
Take your pick. There's the NSA warrantless eavesdropping program wherein the president breezily authorized spying on the phone calls of innocent citizens, in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The FBI's TALON database shows the government has been spying on nonterrorist groups, including Quakers, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, and Veterans for Peace. The Patriot Act lives on. And that's just the stuff we know about.
And this one is a good summary:
1. Hubris
Whenever the courts push back against the administration's unsupportable constitutional ideas—ideas about "inherent powers" and a "unitary executive" or the silliness of the Geneva Conventions or the limitless sweep of presidential powers during wartime—the Bush response is to repeat the same chorus louder: Every detainee is the worst of the worst; every action taken is legal, necessary, and secret. No mistakes, no apologies. No nuance, no regrets. This legal and intellectual intractability can create the illusion that we are standing on the same constitutional ground we stood upon in 2001, even as that ground is sliding away under our feet.
I've written about the declining Bill of Rights here, and took a hit or two for my anti-Republican bias in the process; on the First Amendment taking a kick in the balls here, and on that damn disappearing Fourth Amendment here. I also observed Bill of Rights Day here.
Will it be getting any better any time soon? Here's what Mark Tapscott has to say about that:
WASHINGTON - Incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has cooked up with Public Citizen’s Joan Claybrook a “lobbying reform” that actually protects rich special interests and activists millionaires while clamping new shackles on citizens’ First Amendment rights to petition Congress and speak their minds.
Pelosi tried earlier this year to move H.R. 4682, the “Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2006,” which is now cited by Public Citizen’s Web site as the vehicle it is helping the incoming speaker to craft for the new Congress. The proposal Claybrook is helping craft for introduction early in 2007 is expected to be essentially the same bill Pelosi put forth this year.
That is bad news for the First Amendment and for preserving the kind of healthy, open debate that is essential to holding politicians, bureaucrats and special interests to account for their conduct of the public business.
So the alleged civil liberties party wishes to put more shackles on the free speech rights of Americans; meanwhile, the alleged free market party likes to collude in curbing business innovators. (More on that little tale here and here.
Ayn Rand, commenting on the appropriateness of political activism in America, remarked that "it is earlier than you think." For now, tar and feathers seem appropriate. We'd need a lot of both. Meanwhile, be sure to read Dahlia Lithwick's list.
Happy New Year.
(Hat tip on the list: Jess Walker at Hit&Run")