Thoughts on illegal acts by President Bush

Bush, via Atrios:

Bush said in his address that it is used only to intercept the international communications of people inside the United States who have been determined to have "a clear link" to al- Qaida or related terrorist organizations.

I find it difficult to believe that the illegal wiretaps were necessary if that's true. How difficult is it to get a warrant for someone with a "clear link" to terrorism? If the link is really that clear, I suspect there are very few magistrates who would block such a move, barring a vast conspiracy by the terrorists to infiltrate our justice system. The only likely motivations I can think of for President Bush's 30 authorizations of illegal searching are that (a) the administration fears a terrorist infiltration like the one just mentioned and feels that the system can't be trusted (and so many of the wiretaps were in fact targeting magistrates and court officials), or (b) people in the white house feel they should be able to do whatever the hell they want. The first seems pretty far-fethced to me.

Bob Barr makes some good points about the second attitude:

BARR: Well, the fact of the matter is that the Constitution is the Constitution, and I took an oath to abide by it. My good friend, my former colleague, Dana Rohrabacher, did and the president did. And I don't really care very much whether or not it can be justified based on some hypothetical. The fact of the matter is that, if you have any government official who deliberately orders that federal law be violated despite the best of motives, that certainly ought to be of concern to us.

He's damn right it out to be of concern. Rule of Law may be outmoded in the eyes of certain of those among the administration, but it's the foundation of our political power as citizens, and whenever it's challenged we owe it to ourselves to react swiftly and with vengeance.

Also, Dana Rohrabacher is a moron:

BARR: And the Constitution be damned, Dana?

ROHRABACHER: Well, I'll tell you something, if a nuclear weapon goes off in Washington, DC, or New York or Los Angeles, it'll burn the Constitution as it does. So I'm very happy we have a president that's going to wiretap people's communication with people overseas to make sure that they're not plotting to blow up one of our cities.

Yes, because the Constitution only matters as long as a physical copy of it is not destroyed, and like a 19th-century army who's lost its flag, we'll all give up democracy and surrender to the terrorists over a piece of paper getting ripped up. Actually, the only way to destroy the Constitution is to ignore it - our freedom exists only so long as we collectively believe in it, so every time we praise a president for breaking the law, we actively undermine our freedom. We could have a billion copies of the Constitution, and they'd just be toilet paper if everyone felt as Rohrabacher does.