Stuart Taylor regularly offers a perspective on political issues guided by a beltway sensibility rather than an actual concern for the consequences of his policy suggestions. Matthew Yglesias tears apart this petty little bit of analysis from Taylor, noting that unlimited surveillance powers "result in massive politically motivated abuse." But hey, why worry about that when you can "kick the left in the teeth?"
But the civil libertarians' outrage does not stop there. Indeed, the prospect of anyone in the U.S. being inappropriately wiretapped, surveilled, or data-mined seems to stir the viscera of many Bush critics more than the prospect of thousands of people being murdered by terrorists. This despite the paucity of evidence that any innocent person anywhere has been seriously harmed in recent decades by governmental abuse of wiretapping, surveillance, or data mining.On these and similar issues, Obama will have a choice: He can give the Left what it wants and weaken our defenses. Or he can follow the advice of his more prudent advisers, recognize that Congress, the courts, and officials including Attorney General Michael Mukasey have already moved to end the worst Bush administration abuses -- and kick the hard Left gently in the teeth. I'm betting that Obama is smart and tough enough to do the latter.
Prior to Bush's excesses, FISA allowed surveillance without a warrant for a limited time, so the original argument for wiretapping without a warrant was bogus. More recently, we've seen that, unchecked, these powers lead to the NSA listening in on pillow talk and phone sex. From a security standpoint, it's hard to look for a needle in the haystack if you keep making the haystack bigger than it needs to be.
But all of this is subordinate to Taylor's playground politics: Disrespecting the Left is almost as much of a reason for ignoring the constitutionality of wiretapping without oversight as "protecting innocents." Taylor argues there's a "paucity of evidence" that wiretapping has "harmed innocents" -- as if that were actually relevant. You could argue that on balance, prohibition didn't hurt anyone either -- in fact, given advances in surveillance technology, we might consider bringing prohibition back. After all, the economic crisis means that people will be at greater risk of alcohol abuse, so it only makes sense to ban the substance all together. No innocents will be harmed.
Of course the issue here is not, as much as Taylor would like it to be, that "innocents will be harmed." The issue is constitutionality. Warrantless wiretapping violates the Fourth Amendment, so it should be illegal. We could do a number of things that might not "harm innocents" but violate the Constitution. The latter is a set of binding legal principles. The former is something that must be prevented without violating them. Also, we're using a pretty limited definition of "harmed" here -- it sounds somewhat like the argument that only interrogation methods that result in death, serious injury, or organ failure are torture. People's rights not to be searched without cause are being violated and so by definition they are being "harmed".
This isn't a trivial matter, so I'm mad confused as to how someone with such petty and childish motivations can be taken so seriously. If Taylor's animating principle is "kicking the hard left in the teeth" then by all means, I'm sure Red State could use a few more contributors.
--A. Serwer
