James Bovard Quotes
This is a case if the President is permitted to be above the law, then we no longer have a republic.
Bovard, James. Interview by Brian Lamb. Q&A, C-SPAN, 22 Jan. 2006.
President George W. Bush had ordered NSA agents to bug the phones and email of American citizens who might have been talking with an overseas party or e-mailing them out of the country. The administration thought that American citizens might be part of terrorist sleeper cells or unwittingly were aiding terrorists. The law prohibited such activity—where American citizens were involved—without getting a court order. However, the President claimed that he had the inherent power as commander in chief of exempting the court requirement. Others maintained that even the President is not above the law. What was the big puzzle was that there was a secret court Congress had established just for such cases, but the administration instead decided to bypass the court.
TR had a Supreme Court where a conservative block was in the majority and declared a number of his key reforms as unconstitutional. The same thing happened to FDR as well. Since Supreme Court justices had lifetime tenure most presidents and congresses have to deal with a court that has the political makeup and political philosophy of previous administrations by which they were appointed. Reform and change presidents tend to see the Supreme Court as obstructionist.
One of the conundrums of our constitutional system is who has the last word as to what the Constitution means. Essentially it is the judicial branch headed by the Supreme Court. But there are those who believe that the current popular majority should have a say in what is or is not constitutional. If so the legislative branch should have the last word. Still others say that the President is the only person elected by ALL the people, so his opinion most reflects the will of the public. And then there are most who argue that the Constitutional system was created just to avoid the power of currently popular majorities, and the courts should decide based on the Constitution itself. So the statement has very little meaning except that Phillips thinks that the courts have too much power. Whoever gets to decide what is or is not Constitutional will be accused of being “over” the Constitution by those who don’t like the decisions. In our system, that is the courts.
The President had authorized the NSA to spy Americans who might have been suspected of being themselves or being in contact with terrorists without obtaining permission of a court including the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) special court that had been established for these cases. Instead the administration argues that it was inherent in the powers of the Presidency in time of war.
James Bovard (/bəˈvɑːrd/; born 1956) is an American libertarian author and lecturer whose political commentary targets examples of waste, failures, corruption, cronyism and abuses of power in government. He is a USA Today columnist and is a frequent contributor to The Hill. He is the author of Attention Deficit Democracy and nine other books. He has written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New Republic, Reader's Digest, The American Conservative, and many other publications. His books have been translated into Spanish, Arabic, Japanese, and Korean.
