And just to spice up the boring Plame leak story, John Bolton enters the story.
[/sarcasm]London Bombings
Several of you have asked if I have any thoughts about the new London bombing attempts or the subsequent shooting. Other than “If he was a terrorist, shoot him again,” I have nothing to offer.
Joe Gandelman, on the other hand, has a link rich round-up.
Judge Roberts Update
There are several opinion pieces worth reading regarding Judge Roberts from the past few. The first is this piece by Ed Whelan in NRO, which contains this bit about Roberts and abortion:
The third position is that the Constitution generally does not speak to the question of abortion. Under this substantively neutral position, American citizens would have the constitutional power to determine through their state representatives what the abortion policy in their own states would be. This neutral position — which three members of the current Court, Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas, embrace — also happens to be the proper reading of the Constitution (as I explain more fully here).
Insofar as sensible political labels might be applied to these three positions, it would seem plain that the first (pro-abortion) position would be labeled liberal (with the Roe version of that position being radical), the second (pro-life) would be labeled conservative, and the third (neutral) would be labeled moderate.
Of course, sense does not prevail in the frenzied abortion culture in which we live. Thus, the media routinely label the radical pro-abortion position as “moderate” and the substantively neutral position as “extremist right-wing.” And, of course, the media consistently understate the radical nature of the Roe regime (often pretending, for example, that Roe merely protects abortion in the first three months of pregnancy), confuse the public into thinking that reversing Roe would render abortion illegal, and then cite the public’s resulting support for the imagined Roe as supposed evidence of Roe’s moderation…
John Roberts is, by all accounts, a man of deep intellect and high character who understands the proper role of the judiciary in our constitutional republic. There is therefore good reason to hope that he will be a genuine moderate who will not read his own policy views on abortion (whatever they are) into the Constitution but who will respect the constitutional authority of the people to govern their own states and communities on this and other issues of social policy.
Read the whole thing. Next up is this piece by Jacob Sullum in Reason, titled As Bad As We Want Him To Be?:
Critics of negative campaigning say attack ads reflect poorly on the candidates they’re intended to benefit. That’s not necessarily true, but I do find that attack ads often reflect well on the candidates they’re intended to hurt.
When an announcer gravely warns me that someone running for public office opposes gun control and wants to cut spending, I think, “Hmm. He sounds pretty good.” So it is with Supreme Court nominee John Roberts, whose detractors seem intent on accentuating his positive points.
The main complaint about Roberts is that he might vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. “We continue to believe that Roe was wrongly decided and should be overruled,” said a 1990 brief that he co-authored as a deputy solicitor general in the first Bush administration. “The Court’s conclusion in Roe that there is a fundamental right to abortion and that the government has no compelling interest in protecting prenatal human life throughout pregnancy finds no support in the text, structure, or history of the Constitution.”
Assuming Roberts agrees with the argument he made as the government’s lawyer, I see no cause for alarm. Given how weak the reasoning underlying Roe is—so weak that many abortion rights supporters are embarrassed by the ruling, which they consider a legal and political mistake—it would be alarming if Roberts didn’t think the case was wrongly decided.
Again, read the whole thing. The third piece is law professor William LaPiana, who has this to offer:
Some 30 years ago I was a pre-law adviser at Leverett House in Harvard College when John Roberts was an undergraduate. I hasten to add that I do not remember ever giving him any advice about going to law school. The occasion of his nomination to the Supreme Court is my excuse not for personal reminiscence but rather for some thoughts about the American legal profession at the beginning of the 21st century and about the possible future of the Supreme Court.
John Roberts is a child of the baby boom, both in age and in biography. He has come within reach of filling one of the most important roles in American life by combining a willingness to work, a good deal of ability, no doubt some good fortune and what surely were outstanding scores on standardized tests.
To society at large, Roberts is an example of what perhaps most Americans identify as our meritocratic society. His is not a story of “rags to riches,” of course, but one of outstanding performance at an elite educational institution and a rise from the middle class to the top of one of the two professions — law and medicine — that dominate the ambitions of our generation.
Cass Sunstein, writing in The New Republic, offers a discussion of various judicial philosophies, and writes:
President Bush has added both minimalists and fundamentalists to the lower courts; he has not shown a clear preference in favor of one or the other. Roberts’s record, taken as a whole, gives some modest indications that he tends toward the minimalist camp.
Here’s a good reason to think he isn’t a fundamentalist: He hasn’t publicly committed himself to it. Most fundamentalists are not in the closet. They have strong convictions about how to interpret the Constitution. They believe that the Court has gone badly off the rails, and they are not shy about announcing that fact. Bush might well have chosen another candidate, such as Judge J. Michael Luttig or Judge Janice Rogers Brown, whose fundamentalist credentials are much clearer. Minimalists don’t need, or even like, to announce themselves as such. Judge Roberts’s general silence–his unwillingness to attack existing constitutional law in any kind of public way–suggests a minimalist temperament.
There is another point. Judge Roberts’s opinions thus far are careful, lawyerly, and narrow. They avoid broad pronouncements. They do not try to reorient the law. When he disagrees with his colleagues, he does so with evident respect and with a frank recognition that reasonable people can disagree. In a separate opinion concluding that American soldiers cannot sue Iraq after being held as prisoners in the Gulf war, Roberts’s opinion on some technical issues announces his “agree[ment] with the majority that this question … is close.” His opinions show none of the swagger that can be found in some of the writings of Scalia and Thomas.
Also in the New Republic, Jeffrey Rosen adds the following cautious yet positive evaluation of Roberts, which includes this speculation about Judge Roberts:
Given Roberts’s dazzling talents–his intelligence, judgment, devotion to legal craft, and palpable belief in the power of reasoned argument to constrain judges in meaningful ways–it seems quite possible that his vision of the force of precedent might evolve and grow during decades on the Court. I don’t mean “evolve” in the sense that liberals hope and conservatives fear–that Roberts will become less conservative and more liberal. I mean, instead, that the application of his determined intelligence to the hardest and most elusive questions of constitutional law will lead Roberts to develop a vision of constitutional stability that is uniquely his own. What precisely his vision will be is probably not evident at the moment, even to Roberts himself. But, by focusing on Roberts’s judicial philosophy, rather than his views about the controversies of the moment, the Senate can do much to illuminate this crucial question in the confirmation hearings ahead.
The final piece is from Michael C. Dorf, the Michael I. Sovern Professor of Law at Columbia University, who concludes:
I doubt that President Bush directly sought from Roberts a commitment on particular issues, and as I share the general view of Roberts as a man of integrity, I am certain that if he were asked, he wouldn’t have provided such assurances. So how can movement conservatives be confident that Roberts will vote as one of them?
The short answer is that they cannot be wholly confident, but the longer answer is that they can take considerable comfort from the company Roberts keeps. He clerked for then-Associate Justice William Rehnquist when Rehnquist was clearly the Court’s most conservative member. He spent most of his career in the federal government, but only during Republican administrations. Thus, while Roberts is entitled to say that briefs he wrote, including those calling for the overruling of Roe, were in the service of a policy set by his political bosses, skeptics are equally entitled to ask why Roberts chose to work for these and not for other bosses.
Bag Searches
Police are now randomly searching personal belongings in the NY transit system:
Alarmed by a new round of mass transit attacks in London, police in New York began random searches of bags and packages brought into the city’s vast subway system.
The inspections started on a small scale Thursday in Manhattan and were expanded during Friday morning’s rush hour _ a development welcomed by some commuters.
“I’m not against it,” Ian Compton, 35, a computer consultant, said at Grand Central Terminal in midtown Manhattan. “I think any measures for safety that aren’t terribly intrusive are worth doing.”
Officers, some with bomb-sniffing dogs, were stopping people carrying bags as they entered subways, commuter trains, buses and ferries at various points in the city, police said. Anyone who refuses a search will be turned away, and those caught carrying drugs or other contraband could be arrested.
One man was arrested during Thursday evening rush hour at the Brentwood Long Island Rail Road station after police became suspicious, stopped his van and allegedly found a machete and other weapons. Gilbert Hernandez, 34, had been convicted of possessing a pipe bomb in 1996, police said.
Friday morning, an officer was seen outside a subway stop at Penn Station with a sign saying, “NYPD, Backpacks and other containers subject to inspection.”
No doubt, this will be the source of numerous lawsuits. Or maybe not.
Report Revealing Rove Role Reemerges
Another NY Times piece on Plame:
At the same time in July 2003 that a C.I.A. operative’s identity was exposed, two key White House officials who talked to journalists about the officer were also working closely together on a related underlying issue: whether President Bush was correct in suggesting earlier that year that Iraq had been trying to acquire nuclear materials from Africa.
The two issues had become inextricably linked because Joseph C. Wilson IV, the husband of the unmasked C.I.A. officer, had questioned Mr. Bush’s assertion, prompting a damage-control effort by the White House that included challenging Mr. Wilson’s standing and his credentials. A federal grand jury investigation is under way by a special counsel to determine whether someone illegally leaked the officer’s identity and possibly into whether perjury or obstruction of justice occurred during the inquiry.
People who have been briefed on the case said the White House officials, Karl Rove and I. Lewis Libby, were helping prepare what became the administration’s primary response to criticism that a flawed phrase about the nuclear materials in Africa had been in Mr. Bush’s State of the Union address six months earlier.
They had exchanged e-mail correspondence and drafts of a proposed statement by George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, to explain how the disputed wording had gotten into the address. Mr. Rove, the president’s political strategist, and Mr. Libby, the chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney, coordinated their efforts with Stephen J. Hadley, then the deputy national security adviser, who was in turn consulting with Mr. Tenet.
At the same time, they were grappling with the fallout from an Op-Ed article on July 6, 2003, in The New York Times by Mr. Wilson, a former diplomat, in which he criticized the way the administration had used intelligence to support the claim in Mr. Bush’s speech.
The work done by Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby on the Tenet statement during this intense period has not been previously disclosed. People who have been briefed on the case discussed this critical time period and the events surrounding it to demonstrate that Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby were not involved in an orchestrated scheme to discredit Mr. Wilson or disclose the undercover status of his wife, Valerie Wilson, but were intent on clarifying the use of intelligence in the president’s address. Those people who have been briefed requested anonymity because prosecutors have asked them not to discuss matters under investigation.
The special counsel in the case, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, has been examining this period of time to determine whether the officials’ work on the Tenet statement led in some way to the disclosure of Ms. Wilson’s identity to Robert D. Novak, the syndicated columnist, according to the people who have been briefed.
Tom Maguire, meanwhile, is hopping mad, while Talk Left asserts that Rove has changed his story.
Patriot Act Passes House
The Patriot Act passes the House:
The House voted Thursday to extend permanently virtually all the major antiterrorism provisions of the USA Patriot Act after beating back efforts by Democrats and some Republicans to impose new restrictions on the government’s power to eavesdrop, conduct secret searches and demand library records.
The legislation, approved 257 to 171, would make permanent 14 of the 16 provisions in the law that were set to expire at the end of this year. The remaining two provisions – giving the government the power to demand business and library records and to conduct roving wiretaps – would have to be reconsidered by Congress in 10 years.
The House version of the legislation essentially leaves intact many of the central powers of the antiterrorism act that critics had sought to scale back, setting the stage for what could be difficult negotiations with the Senate, which is considering several very different bills to extend the government’s counterterrorism powers under the act.
One version, approved unanimously Thursday by the Senate Judiciary Committee, would impose greater restrictions on the government’s powers.
But a competing bill passed last month by the intelligence committee would broaden the government’s powers by allowing the Federal Bureau of Investigation to demand records in terrorism investigations without a judge’s order and to have sole discretion in monitoring the mail of some terrorism suspects. That proposal has the strong backing of the Bush administration.
In the House, a daylong debate about the Patriot Act turned into a referendum on the Bush administration’s antiterrorism policies, as lawmakers sought to calibrate the proper balance between protecting national security and ensuring civil liberties.
I am not against the Patriot Act per se, but I am against making it permanent. I see no reason why it should not be revisited every 5 years, if for no other reason than to ascertain the effectiveness and necessity of the measures contained within the Act.
*** Update ***
Via Billmon, this list of what certain sections (in this case, Section 215) of the Patriot Act allow:
– Order any person or entity to turn over “any tangible things,” so long as the FBI specifies that the order is part of an authorized terrorism or intelligence investigation.
– Obtain personal data, including medical records, without any specific facts connecting those records to a foreign terrorist.
– Prohibit doctors and insurance companies from disclosing to their patients that their medical records have been seized by the government.
– Obtain library and book store records, including lists of books checked out, without any specific facts connecting the records to a foreign agent or terrorist.
– Obtain private financial records without a court order, and without notification to the person involved.
– Conduct intelligence investigations of both United States citizens and permanent residents without probable cause, or even reasonable grounds to believe that they are engaged in criminal activity or are agents of a foreign power.
– Investigate U.S. citizens based in part on their exercise of their First Amendment rights, and non-citizens based solely on their exercise of those rights. (Naturally, decisions about what constitutes “in part” are left to a secret court, meeting secretly.)
– Those served with Section 215 orders are prohibited from disclosing that fact to anyone — even their attorney. (This provision was struck down by a U.S. district court last year.)
Suffice it to say, I am against everyone of these provisions. You can whine “But John, we are at warrrrr” until your damned face turns blue. You can bash the ACLU to your heart’s desire. You can tell me “I just don’t get it” as many times as you want. You can give me as many specious arguments about freedom and “democracies needing to defend themselves” until the cows come home. You can issue as many non-threatening platitudes about ” just giving authorities the tools they need’ from now until the end of time. I refuse to support this nonsense. This is un-American. Period.
Border Security
This has scary implications:
Federal agents have shut down an elaborate, 360-foot tunnel used to smuggle drugs from Canada into the United States, the first such passageway discovered on the nation’s northern border, officials said Thursday.
Five people linked to the tunnel were arrested on marijuana trafficking charges, John McKay, a United States attorney, said in this border town about 90 miles north of Seattle.
“They were smart enough to build a sophisticated tunnel,” Mr. McKay said. “They weren’t smart enough to not get caught.”
The tunnel begins under a Quonset hut on the Canadian side and ends under the living room of a home on the United States side, 300 feet from the border. Built with lumber, concrete and metal reinforcing bars, the passageway was equipped with lights and ventilation and ran underneath a highway. It was 3½ to 4 feet high and wide, and ran from 3 to 10 feet below ground, the authorities said.
While I hate our ridiculous and unwinnable ‘War on Drugs’ (the ‘War on your Neighbor’ as I like to call it), what scares me is that if this can be used to smuggle drugs, it can be used to smuggle all sorts of terrorism related personnel and materials.