The makers of our Constitution undertook to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness. They recognized the significance of man's spiritual nature, of his feelings and of his intellect. They knew that only a part of the pain, pleasure and satisfactions of life are to be found in material things. They sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations. They conferred, as against the government, the right to be let alone-the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men. To protect, that right, every unjustifiable intrusion by the government upon the privacy of the individual, whatever the means employed, must be deemed a violation of the Fourth Amendment. . . . Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.
. . . Decency, security, and liberty alike demand that government officials shall be subjected to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen. In a government of laws, existence of the government will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously. Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that in the administration of the criminal law the end justifies the means-to declare that the government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal-would bring terrible retribution. Against that pernicious doctrine this court should resolutely set its face.
(Emphasis supplied.) In the Declaration of Independence, among the grievances listed against King George III were:
He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
. . . He has obstructed the Administration of Justice by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary Powers.
. . . He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.
. . . For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury:
. . . For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
The proposed FISA Capitulation suffers from many of the same faults. Glenn Greenwald points us to Joe Galloway's column today on the same subject:
[T]hese bad actors are prepared to set aside your right to privacy — written into the Constitution as a key part of our Bill of Rights — with hardly a nod in the direction of the true patriots who rebelled against an English king and his army to guarantee those rights.
That they will do this while the last empty phrases of the political windbags at the Fourth of July celebrations are still echoing across a thousand city parks and the bright red, white and blue bunting and blizzard of American flags still flap in the breeze is little short of breath-taking.
How dare they?
We can not remain silent to these abuses. As citizens, we must speak out against the FISA Capitulation. Those who would put candidate before principle here shame themselves.
By Big Tent Democrat, speaking for me only
