Bush Quietly "Repeals" Major Privacy Law
By Patriot Daily, Section Diaries Posted on Thu Jan 11, 2007 at 11:43:23 AM EST
Tags: george w. bush, privacy, civil rights, war on terror (all tags)

Bush is fed up with hearing how his actions and policies violate our privacy rights. True to Bush's Orwellian worldview, his answer is to create a privacy board to ostensibly protect our rights. In reality, it is Mr. Decider who controls the privacy board so that his interpretation of laws will determine how and if our rights are actually protected by more than shallow words. It is the implementation of these interpretations which will chip away through the backdoor or repeal/amend our privacy rights under federal law. The chipping has already started.

A President is afforded some leeway to interpret Congressional laws which must be executed by the Executive Branch. Under our system, if the executive branch oversteps its bounds when it implements a program under its reasonable interpretation of the law, then there is an interim period between implementation of the program and eventual redress by the courts or Congress in which citizens' rights are violated. The violation of our rights during this interim period would not usually be considered as any kind of repeal or amendment of the law because redress will occur in the usual course of our process to ensure that the existing laws are honored. Therefore, Bush's interpretation and implementation of programs is just business as usual in our democracy, or so the White House often says.

If this were anyone other than the worst President in our history, then this meme might have some traction. The problem is that Bush has injected steroids into this power so that he may unilaterally change laws. It is not business as usual when the President's interpretation of laws is based consistently on legal analysis that is twisted upside down and contrary to the majority view of courts, experts and scholars on the most basic and simple issues. It is not business as usual when the President abuses his powers to prevent the courts and Congress from providing the remedies that our system envisions to stop the violation of our rights. It is not business as usual when the President demands that the laws be changed to adopt or legalize his illegal programs retroactively. And, it is not business as usual when the President demands that these new laws also provide retroactive immunity to him and executive branch officials.

It is one thing if a President obtains reasonable legal analysis of how to interpret laws which the Executive Branch must implement, and then the process of review by the courts or Congress can take place to redress any violations which occur during the period between implementation and redress. However, if it is the intent and plan of the President from the beginning to say the hell with the laws, implement a program that violates these laws, and then ultimately plan to change the laws to legalize his programs and provide immunity, then there is no redress for violation of our rights. That interim period between implementation and redress then becomes a period when the laws were repealed or amended de facto by the President. We have seen this with Bush's NSA spying program on Americans. Congress enacted FISA in 1978 to protect us by imposing a warrant requirement before government surveillance. The law was straightforward and clear that government surveillance required a warrant, but Bush defended his actions with a convoluted theory of unitary executive powers to change the law. Bush then used his usual secrecy cloaks of national security and classified information to prevent judicial redress and Congressional oversight while seeking a new law to adopt his program and provide him with retroactive immunity for violating our rights. If Bush succeeds, then essentially the "law" that determined our rights for the past 5 years was not FISA, but Bush's interpretation of FISA.
Bush is using this same game plan to repeal or amend our privacy rights.