NYT: "Kabuki Congress"

[Rose Siding]

Editorial
Published: March 6, 2006

Imagine being stopped for speeding and having the local legislature raise the limit so you won't have to pay the fine. It sounds absurd, but it's just what is happening to the 28-year-old law that prohibits the president from spying on Americans without getting a warrant from a judge.

It's a familiar pattern. President Bush ignores the Constitution and the laws of the land, and the cowardly, rigidly partisan majority in Congress helps him out by rewriting the laws he's broken.

In 2004, to take one particularly disturbing example, Congress learned that American troops were abusing, torturing and killing prisoners, and that the administration was illegally detaining hundreds of people at camps around the world. The chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, John Warner, huffed and puffed about the abuse, but did nothing. And when the courts said the detention camps do fall under the laws of the land, compliant lawmakers simply changed them.

Now the response of Congress to Mr. Bush's domestic wiretapping scheme is following the same pattern, only worse.......MORE.......

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/06/opinion/06mon1.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

[bemildred]

1. The rule of men, and not of law. nt

[rodeodance]

2. and it is what is happening with port issue (i have not read the article-

maybe they talk of it also).

[jaxx]

3. The America we knew is going.

It's an awful thought, but look at what the bushies have done, and gotten by with. Where is the stopping point? How much do we have to lose before we can start gathering our rags about us and try to put this country back together? It makes me sick to know our rights are being taken away by some hired hand, and his partisan congress, who aren't worth their paychecks.

[katty]

6. it's gone

[rodeodance]

4. Congress rewriting the foreign-intelligence law the way Mr. Bush wants.

..There were glimmers of hope on the House side. Representative Heather Wilson, the New Mexico Republican who heads one of the subcommittees supervising intelligence, called for a "painstaking" review of the necessity and legality of the spying operation. But the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Peter Hoekstra, is turning that into a pro forma review that would end with Congress rewriting the foreign-intelligence law the way Mr. Bush wants.

[Dirty Hippie]

5. Congress? I think "Politburo" is a better name n/t

[Inland]

7. In the fascist state, the legislature turns into a cheering section.

Yes, according to the law, it exists. Yes, according to the law, it needs to approve. But what's written down doesn't mean shit. Hitler had his Reichstag, Stalin had his Congress, and it was all for show. The sole function of the de jure legislature was to symboilcally represent the nation backing the Great Leader.