"We Elected A Centrist President" Is It Centrist To Support FISA?

[Leopolds Ghost]

Feel free to suggest what right wing Bush policies you expect to see
rolled back WITHOUT complaint from so-called "centrists" on this board.

[Cessna Invesco Palin]

1. .

[rucky]

2. I'm confused. FISA's been around for awhile.

So does "supporting FISA" mean FISA before Bush, or Bush's bastardization of FISA?

[Leopolds Ghost]

3. The latter, mostly.

There were problems with FISA before, such as the "roving wiretaps" clause being used to track non-suspects conversations in criminal cases, but those were not the problems Bush was trying to solve. The problems Bush and the Bush-centrists saw with FISA was that it didn't allow enough warrantless wiretapping to make the generric spying on all Americans legal. And since Bush I kicked off the project to make it possible to track all communications, clearly the 4th Amendment was outdated, just like some on the left think the 2nd and 3rd are outdated.

(Interestingly, we violated the 3rd Amendment in Iraq and nobody said anything, so I guess it's still needed.)

[Occam Bandage]

6. I was unaware that Constitutional rights extended to Iraqis in Iraq living under Iraqi law.

[Leopolds Ghost]

7. I thought the purpose of the Iraq war is to extend American freedoms to Iraq.

What other justification can there be for supposedly centrist folks not wanting us to leave immediately because of the immorality of it all?

[Occam Bandage]

9. I don't think you'll find anyone who believes

that the purpose of the Iraq war is to extend the jurisdiction of the United States Constitution to Iraqis living in Iraq.

[Leopolds Ghost]

10. Don't you think the Bill of Rights are inalienable & include rights anyone should have?

Such as the right not to have American soldiers quartered in their house?

[Occam Bandage]

12. If you're going to talk about universal rights,

then I would phrase the third amendment as such: "Persons have the right to refuse their government the right to quarter soldiers in their house during peacetime, and have the right to legal protection when their government must quarter soldiers in their house during wartime."

The Iraqi government of course has violated this, but if we want to talk about universal rights that the Iraqi government isn't exactly championing, then we have bigger fish to fry.

[Leopolds Ghost]

15. Yep, I like to talk about them. ;-)

[Occam Bandage]

4. FISA has been around for decades, so I would think so, yes.

[Leopolds Ghost]

5. So you wouldn't support an attack on warrantless wiretapping.

[Occam Bandage]

8. Depends on what we're talking about.

If we're talking about adding transparency guidelines and increasing internal checks to prevent abuses of power, then yes, I think that could be considered centrist. If we're talking about completely destroying the entire concept of FISA, then no, I do not think that is reasonable.

[Leopolds Ghost]

11. You don't think it's reasonable not to have warrantless wiretapping of all communications?

What issues DO you think a progressive should focus on?

[Occam Bandage]

13. I never said I approved of wiretapping all communications. Not sure where you got that.

The original charter of FISA, after all, allows warrantless wiretaps only so long as there is no substantial likelihood that the surveillance will acquire the contents of any communication involving an American citizen or lawful resident. While this is open to abuses, I think that strengthening the checks on that restriction is more reasonable than scrapping the entire system.

[Leopolds Ghost]

14. What concerns me is the way they have set up an infrastructure that can only be used as a dragnet.

[Pastiche423]

16. Thank you for posting the poll on this issue

Spying on Americans is not what FISA was created for. I do hope the bastardization of the bill will be corrected in the next congress.

[Augdog20]

17. Times on Obama's centrist picks

Check out NY Times article posted to my blog; cites centrist trend:

http://bluesunited.blogspot.com/

[baldguy]

18. Not so much centrist as it is pragmatic.

The FISA vote was maneuvered to come up last summer to embarrass the Democrats. Obama chose not to take the bait.