Like I said, overnight polls should not be trusted. Here's the latest from Newsweek, a sister company to the Washington Post:
| as the Bush administration gone too far in expanding the powers of the President to fight terrorism? Yes, say a majority of Americans, following this week’s revelation that the National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone records of U.S. citizens since the September 11 terrorist attacks. According to the latest NEWSWEEK poll, 53 percent of Americans think the NSA’s surveillance program “goes too far in invading people’s privacy,” while 41 percent see it as a necessary tool to combat terrorism.
President Bush tried to reassure the public this week that its privacy is “fiercely protected,” and that “we’re not mining or trolling through the personal lives of innocent Americans.” Nonetheless, Americans think the White House has overstepped its bounds: 57 percent said that in light of the NSA data-mining news and other executive actions, the Bush-Cheney Administration has “gone too far in expanding presidential power.” That compares to 38 percent who think the Administration’s actions are appropriate. |
My guess is that by the time the weekend is over, the number of Americans disapproving of the program will increase by another 10-15%.
But as always.... Billmon nails the much larger point: Polls are irrelevant when we're talking about basic civil liberties. The point - the entire point, in fact - of the Bill of Rights is to protect the individual against both the state, the majority, or both.
| The whole point of having civil liberties is that they are not supposed to be subject to a majority veto. Hobbes may not have believed in natural rights, but our founders did. And their opponents, the anti-Federalists, were even more zealous about restraining the powers of the federal superstate, which is why they forced the Federalists to write the Bill of Rights directly into the Constitution.
It defeats the purpose of having a 4th Amendment if its validiity is entirely dependent on breaking 50% in the latest poll. It would be nice to have "the people" on our side in this debate, and obviously a lot of them are, even if Doherty's plurality still prefers Leviathan's crushing embrace. But some things are wrong just because they're wrong -- not because a temporary majority (or even a permanent one) thinks they're wrong. Real conservatives used to understand this. But the authoritarian right, for all of its talk about moral absolutes, understands and respects just one thing: power. In our system power flows from votes -- and having the money to demagogue those votes. It doesn't get more relativistic than that. We can't do anything about how a corrupt, oligarchic system works (or rather, doesn't work) but we can at least stop accepting the other side's terms for the debate. What the government is doing is illegal and unamerican, and that would still be true if the polls showed 99% support -- in fact, it would be even more true. |
Our entire system of government is built on this premise. Its the bedrock on which the story of America's success over the past 230 has been built. Over that short span of history, literally millions of Americans have fought and died to leave to us the system we have today. And despite their sacrifice, millions of today's citizens seem perfectly willing to trade it all away for something a vast, vast majority of them already have - security.
The Cold War was an armageddon inducing, civilization ending, existential threat for not just our nation but the entire world. I know it is still considered impolite by some to say this, but the battle against Islamic extremism simply does not rise to that level. That doesn't mean it's not still a deadly serious affair, but please... we need to have some perspective on this.
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