The Elected Monarchy

Of all George W Bush's many flaws, his most disturbing is his belief that the President is an elected monarch. He truly seems to believe that the President should be answerable to anyone twice in his reign: once to get elected, and again to get re-elected. This explains his extraordinary jubuliance the day after he barely squeaked out a tainted win over John Kerry. From that day until January 2009, George W Bush thinks of himself as George III of America.

This has really come to light with the wiretapping scandal. From my reading of the Constitution, this is illegal search and seizure. Wiretapping is infiltrating your home to acquire evidence against you or your acquaintances for a criminal procedure. This is the same as the police rifling through your home or office looking for similar evidence. This is perfectly legally--with a search warrant.

Congress bent over backwards to set up a court to accommodate both the nation's need for executive action to preserve our security and the demands of the law to protect ourselves from abusive government. Bush even has 72 hours to retroactively get a warrant. The court requires only two things: a target, and probably cause.

Bush claims this is too much to ask. One can easily suspect that is because he has no probable cause. Included on his list of "terror suspects" are liberal-minded Americans engaged in free exercise of their democratic rights. Does anyone honestly believe the ACLU is colluding with Al Qaeda or plotting to blow up a government building? They were one of the targets.

Bush also wants to engage in data mining. You put a bug on someone, and then listen for suspicious activity. The government can find all sorts of information on you, about how Aunt Martha is, about how ugly you think Laura Bush's new hairdo is, or about how you plan to cheat on your taxes. They can do this without probable cause by avoiding the courts, who would demand to know why they think you are a suspect. Again, this is similar to the police randomly dropping by your house or office, rummaging through your stuff to uncover something, anything, that may be illegal and then charging you with a crime. This is covered under the Bill of Rights as illegal search and seizure.

One can also speculate, with some evidence, that Bush or future presidents would use this for their political security. The KGB did this regularly, as do many totalitarian regimes. Nixon had his enemies list, and the Plumbers to fix leaks and look for damaging evidence against his political opponents. Do we really want Bush to use his wiretapping abilities against Hillary Clinton to then blackmail her in the 2008 election? To me, this is a jab to the jugular vein of American democracy.

Nixon believed that he had this power. Watergate started out as a wiretapping scheme against the Democratic headquarters. It lead to the most spectacular crash in American political history. It was supposed to teach a civics lesson: the President of the United States is not above the law. George Bush has told us in as a plain language as he can muster that so long as he is president, the laws don't apply to him. He and the GOP will then have to support that they don't apply to future presidents of all political stripes.

The Madness of King George W