On September 15, after classes had resumed in the city, I babbled on in front of the class for at least a half an hour worrying about a degeneration of civil liberties. One little smarty pants came up to me after class and said that I shouldn’t such a bummer and that I should be making the students feel better instead. Me. Red face angry. Told the kid to grow up and not to expect any handholding from me. Mr. Smarty-Pants promptly dropped the class.
Even though I knew that we would end up here, I didn’t expect that there would be debate about it. There are actually people talking about the benefits of torture and the legality of wire taps. Their arguments are so insane that I don’t have a ready response other than a mouth gaped open. I guess I have to collect myself and get in attack position. This debate has gone on for too long. No handholding from me.
Scott Lemieux knows his stuff on con. law. Read him on the illegality of the wiretaps.
Apt. 11d 
I have relatively little concern for privacy rights here. Let me frame my comment by saying that I live in Arlington County, where Al Qaeda killed 160 people – parents of kids in my kids’ school, husband of a school principal. We’re not New York, but we do have a bull’s eye on us.
Privacy rights have been in my view invented into the Constitution in large part because contraception and sex practices were being criminalized, and finding a privacy right in the penumbras and emanations of the Constitution was a convenient tool to liberalize the laws on sex. I’m in favor of liberalized laws on sex, but I kind of think it’d have been better to have done it in a legislature. I really don’t care at all if someone in the NSA looks at my calls to Switzerland – or California – and thinks whether I am calling the same guys as someone who Al Qaeda has been calling, and looks at me a little more closely, if that is the price of having them able to do that for people who are thinking how to kill people in Arlington again.
So – what Bush has authorized may or may not be legal, but if it isn’t, it should be, and I’m glad the government is doing it and I hope it continues.
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If Bush thought the courts or congress would rubberstamp this, he would have had the court or congress ruberstamp this. The other point is that these things have a way of expanding away from the terrorism focus onto the drug war or other problems.
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