aeroripper

He's dead, and what if current whistleblowers tried to direct it to the correct people to take care of it, but they didn't want to listen?

leejo

The President and Congress frequently bump heads over whose power is limited where. I think that each President's position who has explicitely stated that FISA does not represent any limit to his authority to conduct surveilance has taken the position that the law is not exactly Constitutional.

If you really want to get down to it, the President can do absolutely A-N-Y-T-H-I-N-G that doesn't result in an impeachment and subsequent removal from office when the Senate votes. Right? What else is going to stop him? The Constitution only offers that remedy.

Fair enough. The writer of the article I posted is "the William R. Kenan Jr. professor of government at Harvard." so he has some pretty good bona fides.

Diceman

Yeah, I read the by-line too. Without some justification of his arguments, that's just an appeal to authority.

On the other hand, I don't think it'd be all that hard to find a goodly number of well-credentialled people to support my position, if that's the route we want to go down.

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leejo

Deep Throat revealed corruption: using the executive branch to cover up friends' crimes. These people who got chatty with reporters were not asserting that the President has been corrupt, merely illegal. However, they have made a mistake that will likely cost several jail time. Two mistakes really: 1) never talk to a reporter, but if you must talk to your lawyer first; 2) that which is illegal is not necessarily unconstitutional. Anyone who's cheered when a court tosses out a conviction of a law it considers unconstitutional knows this second piece, and the first seems pretty obvious.

The courts are not the only body who have the power to judge a law unconstitutional. In fact, the courts aren't granted judicial review anywhere in the constitution. That's a power that Chief Justice Marshall discovered/created and implemented and it's been accepted ever since (Marbury vs. Madison (1803)). Presidents have also deemed certain laws unconstitutional (by ignoring them) and the courts have born this power out by refusing to intervene.

Had these "whistleblowers" talked to appropriate authorities instead of the press and those authorities had shown no interest, then the whistleblowers should have kept their mouths shut and carried their secrets to the grave. This is not a joke and those people are trusted with some of the nation's deepest secrets. If one doesn't like what's going on, resign and get out. These people do not have the authority to decide when and if to release information about these secrets.

Hell what's the point if every time an employee gets his panties in a wad they can just ignore the law and blab to the nearest conspiracy-hungry reporter?

ScratchMonkey

Not the current one. No formal declaration was ever passed. Ron Paul (R, TX) introduced one but it was not passed. Not really even considered. Congress doesn't want to take responsibility for it, and is happy to let the Prez do what he wants on this subject.

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leejo

It's not an appeal to authority, just saying the guy has credentials to be taken seriously on this subject.

Find all the authorities you like. The President isn't going to get impeached over this and if the case makes it to SCOTUS they will decline to hear it.

I'll betcha a nickle.

Diceman

Consider both him and his credentials taken very seriously.

I'm not much of a betting man but, if I was, I still wouldn't take your wager. I think you're right. The odds of Bush getting impeached are very slim, so it seems to me. But that doesn't mean that he shouldn't be impeached.

As I've said before, if there is a law of the land and someone breaks it, then isn't that person a criminal? When a person swears to uphold and defend the law, doesn't that make their transgression that much worse?

If I take your idea of presidents being able to do anything, so long as they aren't impeached, then I would need you to explain how that doesn't translate into a moral maxim for everyone else: do whatever you like, just don't get caught.

Respect for the concept of Rule of Law demands that truth of this idea be seen. Otherwise, you move towards despotism.

On whistleblowers, you're probably also right that whistleblowers don't have the authority to release the information they do. Not in a legal sense, certainly. But I don't believe these people are motivated so much by legal appeals but by a moral conviction that they are doing the right thing. That goes for all whistleblowers, both left and right. These folks are very likely smart enough to figure out that it is not in their immediate interests to follow-through on their ideas of going public. Some do it anyway, guided by higher motivations than wealth, money, fame or power.

Yep, you're right on that one. Of course, the United States hasn't been in a declared state of war for how long now? Since WW2 (just a guess)?

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leejo

Not so. The President can be held accountable in other ways. A president has to come up before the electorate. A president has to get appropriations from the Congress. A president still has to get his appointments approved.

I guess Congress is like the old army saying: Congress can't make the President do anything, but it can sure make him wish he had.

Diceman

Heh heh, well said. With regards to what will happen, I guess we'll all need to wait and see. I expect I'll be disappointed and I expect you'll feel vindicated. We'll still disagree, but it's been an interesting discussion.

Dice.

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Steeler

According to ABC, one of the sources on the current NSA case DID make his concerns known, and he was dismissed. Going up the chain of command won't get you very far when the illegal order comes from the highest authority. Who is there left to appeal to? Only the electorate.

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Arf

I respect your opinion but that's insane. Corruption would propagate in the government simply by ignoring the claims that they are corrupt. That philosophy is the perfect way for the corrupt to purge themselves of the honest.

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leejo

So it's perfectly alright in your view for a whistleblower to use his or her discretion to ignore the law in order to "do what's right" but the President of the United States is a criminal if he ignores the law to "do what's right"?

Why is submarining a secret NSA program noble and excusable but agressively intercepting Al Quada communications beyone the pale? I think you're going to have a hard time getting many polls to agree with that position.

The Constitution places great power in the President to use discretion with regard to the law but none in an NSA staffer.

Steeler

Facts not in evidence. It remains to be seen whether or not the broad NSA eavesdropping program was "what's right." I suspect that it is not. Whether they were recording and datamining huge swaths of the population's calls, building more flawed "no-fly" lists, keeping Nixonian-style tabs on possible trouble groups like PETA, or simply using the secret program to gather evidence for actual FISA court cases, that all sounds wrong. But we just don't know.

As for whistleblowers, there are shield laws to protect them from retribution in private enterprise cases, where someone reveals illegal activity by a boss or company. So yes, we do offer whistleblowers a certain level of immunity for their ability to reveal a crime. Government and national security issues are a little murkier - the problem being that yes, revealing classified information is illegal, but it is far too easy to place self-serving or outright criminal information into the "national security" category.

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leejo

It is? How do you know this?

My point about "what is right" is that clearly that's a subjective thing. However, 200 million people voted in an election over the President's vision of "what is right". Who elected these NSA staffers? Who gave them the power to decide on a case-by-case basis which of the nations deepest secrets they choose to hold close and which they choose to leak?

Blowing a secret program out of the water because the President a) is using that program to end politcal opponents' careers; b) kill innocent civilians; c) line his own pocket; d) protect himself from the consequences of some heinous act; e) authorized the NSA to listen to international phone calls from suspected Al Quada members overseas to domestic phone numbers without securing a warrant from a secret court but having briefed members of Congress on the activity....

You just aren't going to win this one, gang.

SmokingTarpan

You make it sound as if the president is, to copy the name of a really bad movie, above the law. Basically, so long as no one drags him out of his bed and pitches him in the gutter, he can do whatever. I don't think that's right, and sounds very much like a dictator instead of a president.

And oh yea, down with PETA. :P

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