In the words of Founding Father Ben Franklin: "They, who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty nor security."
In America, during the last 7 years, there has been an attack on the freedoms that make the nation great. Government secret surveillance, authorized by the Patriot Act, has infringed on many of the liberties that are guaranteed by the American Constitution. The war on terrorism has distorted the powers of government so much, that Ben Franklin, Madison and Jefferson would be horrified.
The Constitution:
The American system of government was carefully constructed to provide “checks and balances” on the three parts of the government.
- Executive Branch
- Legislative Branch
- Judicial Branch
Designed after the tripartite system of Baron de Montesquieu; James Madison said in Federalist #51 that the purpose is to "form a more correct judgment of the principles and structure of the government planned by the [Constitutional] convention.” Madison continued: “In order to lay a due foundation for that separate and distinct exercise of the different powers of government….it would require that all the appointments for the supreme executive, legislative, and judiciary magistracies should be drawn from the same fountain of authority, the people….”
In Jeremy Bailey’s Book “Thomas Jefferson and Executive Power,” he states: “To the extent that scholars have examined Jefferson and the presidency, there is a consensus that he was…an enemy of executive power.”
Problems:
Many of the war on terrorism security laws have effectively removed either legislative members or the judiciary from the process and given the executive unprecedented power. The Attorney General (an executive branch appointee) may order surveillance without judicial review. Eventually a secret court may, according to 50 USCA. §1803, issue a warrant. As stated by Robyn Blumner in May 21’s, 2006 St Petersburg Times: “His [George Bush’s] disregard for the separation of powers has so dramatically distorted the office of the president that he may have engineered a turning point in American history.”
The American Civil Liberties Union stated in a fact sheet that “The Police America Act [Protect America Act]…allows for massive, untargeted collection of international communications without court order or meaningful oversight by either Congress or the courts.”
Madison believed liberty would be guaranteed by competition between departments. “But the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others.” But as Blumner states: “…Congress is standing by while its house is being pillaged. The power to write federal laws is Congress' alone.”
Freedoms
The Constitution and the Bill of Rights is the core of American liberty. The attacks made by the Bush Administration are in direct violation of these fundamentals as stated by Professor Fred Kate of the Indiana University School of Law: there is “…a series of dramatic moves over the past five years - most recently the passage of the Protect America Act – [that] has weakened statutory and judicial oversight of domestic surveillance to the point that one wonders whether, by the time the Bush Administration and Congress are finished, there is going to be any legal oversight of domestic surveillance at all...”
The Fourth Amendment; “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized,” is under assault by the security and surveillance laws passed in the USA.
