Does President Obama Believe in the Constitution?
John on July 30, 2010 at 6:35 pm
Way back in October of 2007 when candidate Obama’s Presidential aspirations still seemed like a long shot, he appeared at the first ever (and likely last) MTV/MySpace Presidential Forum. Here’s a bit of what he had to say:
You know I taught constitutional law for 10 years at the University of Chicago, so…um…your next President will actually believe in the Constitution which you can’t say about your current President. [applause]
In today’s environment in particular I want Supreme Court Justices who are vigilant about civil liberties. Because I think that when people are afraid — and terrorism has created fear — then that’s when the greatest danger to civil liberties happens. It’s easy to be for civil liberties when there are no threats. It’s when there are threats that you start seeing civil liberties chipped away at. So I want a President…I want a Supreme Court that is not just giving the President a blank check for whatever power grab he or she is engaging in.
By the way that also means that when I’m President one of the first things I’m going to do is call in my attorney general and say to him or her I want you to review every executive order that’s been issued by George Bush — whether it relates to warrantless wiretaps, or detaining people or reading e-mails, or whatever it is — I want you to go through every single one of them and if they are unconstitutional or they are encroaching on civil liberties unnecessarily we are going to overturn them…we are going to change them.
The line about the Constitution was a cheap shot, one of the cheapest of the campaign, but his promise to insure the civil liberties of Americans was sincere. No more warrantless wiretaps. Of course he changed his tune on that after becoming President. No more detaining people in Gitmo. Last I checked, Gitmo was still in operation. And no more reading people’s e-mails. Well, at least he hasn’t changed his mind on that one:
The Obama administration is seeking to make it easier for the FBI to compel companies to turn over records of an individual’s Internet activity without a court order if agents deem the information relevant to a terrorism or intelligence investigation.
The administration wants to add just four words — “electronic communication transactional records” — to a list of items that the law says the FBI may demand without a judge’s approval. Government lawyers say this category of information includes the addresses to which an Internet user sends e-mail; the times and dates e-mail was sent and received; and possibly a user’s browser history. It does not include, the lawyers hasten to point out, the “content” of e-mail or other Internet communication.
So the same Barack Obama who accused a sitting President of not believing in the Constitution on nationwide television and who name checked e-mail security in the diatribe that followed, now as President he’s actually making it easier to look at e-mail transactions. Obviously, when the feds find something that interests them, they’ll need a further warrant to look at the text. But thanks to the Obama administration, they’ll be able to cast a wider net before doing so.
Does the President still believe in the Constitution? If so then I think he owes former President Bush an apology.
Category: Crime & the Law, Politics |
Out of all the things to love about the Obambi Administration, I think I dig the holier-than-thou sanctimony the best.
That and the looming job-killing tax hikes.
July 31, 2010 @ 4:44 amNo matter who the president is, they are all the same. Yes, the government wants to spy on us. That’s not really new is it?
Let us not forget that we have power too. We can use tools to encrypt our email (GPG, PGP, TrulyMail, etc.) and our browsing (TOR, etc.) so we need not simply allow the information to be taken.
Let us not simply stand back while we are taken advantage of.
July 31, 2010 @ 6:00 amSo he was half honest… he telegraphed that incessant need to have courts rule on behalf of the “vulnerable,” even if new law is created unconstitutionally. So much for having taught the subject.
July 31, 2010 @ 6:47 amI don’t believe many of the things this president says. I observed him during the campaign (which seems to be ongoing) use speech to appeal to a particular audience. This resulted in contradictions. I am convinced that he honestly believes that the “end justifies the means” and this is, to him, a higher principle than the Constitution (a document he describes as “flawed”).
Spying now serves his ends.
July 31, 2010 @ 9:14 amPowerline commented at the time:
“I hope Obama was smiling when he said this because, if anything, constitutional law professors are less likely than their fellow Americans to respect the Constitution. As Obama surely knows, some Con Law profs view the Constitution as a malleable document that’s worthy of respect only to the extent it can be interpreted to mandate, or at least not impede, the enactment of their preferred political, social, and economic agenda. The respect in these cases is not for the Constitution but for the agenda, and perhaps for the professor’s own cleverness in manipulating the Constitution to accommodate it.”
July 31, 2010 @ 1:28 pm“Does President Obama Believe In The Constitution?” Well, so far there’s nothing in his record to indicate he does, so it must be a rhetorical question. I must mildly disagree with Ms. Nguyen when she writes that Obama’s behaviour is “…not new.” I’m pretty sure no administration since FDR has been so uninhibited in its pursuit of autocratic powers.
August 1, 2010 @ 12:02 pm