It's Good to Be the King

by Liberty and Power

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell says he sees “absolutely nothing wrong with the president authorizing” eavesdropping on domestic phone calls and e-mails without first getting warrants (New York Times). But he also says that George II would have had no problem getting warrants had he asked for them.

When a president finds the rubber-stamp process of the FISA court too onerous, you’ve got to wonder if something else is going on. As Mel Brooks said, “It’s good to be the king.”

(Cross-posted at Free Association.)

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Robert Higgs - 12/26/2005

If the president considers the Constitution itself (including its Fourth Amendment), which he solemnly swore to preserve, protect, and defend, "just a goddamned piece of paper," one can well surmise the kind of reverence in which he holds any mere statutory constraint on his untrammeled desires.

And don't even get me started on his likely view of the Constitution's Ninth and Tenth Amendments--"just a goddamned ink blot on a goddamned piece of paper"?

And yet some people have the audacity to call our system of (elaborately rigged) electoral dictatorship a "limited constitutional government."