A Thinking Reed

And that’s supposed to make us feel better?

Written by

Lee M.

in

National Review trots out the “But Bill Clinton did it too!” defense (via Tischreden) in the matter of warrant-less domestic spying.

Question: since when is Bill Clinton the paragon of judicious uses of executive power for conservatives?

UPDATE: Just to be clear – the NR article isn’t claiming that the Clinton administration in fact carried out warrant-less spying, but that it claimed the authority to do so. For what that’s worth.

UPDATE II: Matthew Yglesias writes:

Various illegal surveillance apologists are raising the argument that the Clinton administration, too, took the view that warrantless wiretaps were a good thing. “Shockingly,” these arguments turn out to be somewhat inaccurate upon further scrutiny. But debating the accuracy of these claims is largely besides the point. Of course the Clinton administration wanted, insofar as it was able, to maximize executive power while minimizing judicial and congressional oversight. Of course Al Gore or John Kerry would, from the vantage point of the White House, have wanted to do the same thing. That’s the point — you can’t rely on the occupant of the office to limit his own authority because of course he’ll want his own authority to be as broad as possible.

P.S. for a quite damning indictment of Clinton’s record on civil liberties, read Jim Bovard’s Feeling Your Pain. Bovard is an equal-opportunity muckraker (his recent books include The Bush Betrayal and Terrorism and Tyranny: Trampling Freedom, Justice and Peace to Rid the World of Evil).

Comments

4 responses to “And that’s supposed to make us feel better?”

  1. Eric Lee

    I don’t particular care to defend Clinton or Bush, but if I’m not mistaken, don’t these sites show that that NRO article is in fact false?

    The Echelon Myth
    Drudge Fact Check

    The whole left part of the blogosphere has been linking to that stuff for the last couple of days.

    Peace,

    Eric

    Reply
  2. jack perry

    Eric Lee, maybe I misunderstand you, but the NRO article by Byron York does not claim that Clinton signed an executive order authorizing warrantless searches or wiretaps, as one of the Think Progress articles cites; nor does he make any claims about Echelon, as the other cites. The only executive order I find listed in York’s article is one signed by Reagan.

    York is simply quoting Jamie Gorelick, who argued that for the purposes of foreign intelligence, the executive branch had the authority to carry out warrantless physical searches, including break-ins, and including on US citizens. This was related to a case: Authorities had searched Ames’s house without a warrant, and the Justice Department feared that Ames’s lawyers would challenge the search in court.

    So, I don’t think the NRO article is false.

    Lee, National Review is not a typical knee-jerk right-wing operation. (This is why I can read it, but I can’t stand Rush Limbaugh, or Drudge, or …) NRO tend to publish a wide variety of conservative views, such as pro- and anti-“drug war” essays. They supported President Clinton on a number of issues related to security, while sometimes criticizing what they saw as Clinton’s mishandling, much as Lieberman supports Bush on a number of issues related to terrorism, while criticizing what he sees as Bush’s mishandling.

    So, there’s no inconsistency in NRO’s publishing the article.

    Reply
  3. Lee

    Jack – I agree with your reading of the York article and the links Eric provided. York isn’t saying that the Clinton admin. actually carried out warrantless searches, merely that it claimed the authority to do so (which is not rebutted by those articles as far as I can tell). I probably should’ve made that clearer in my original post.

    I also agree that NR does allow for a diversity of viewpionts (though maybe not as diverse as I’d like!). I was a NR subscriber for about 4 years, but around the time of the Iraq war I got tired of the seemingly endless stream of articles about all the Arab countries we need to bomb, invade, engineer regime change in, etc.

    Then I started reading the American Conservative, which publishes some interesting articles, but it’s a little too obsessed with the “neocons.”

    Reply
  4. Eric Lee

    Ah, I stand corrected. In that case those articles still stand on their own in response to those other allegations, although not in this case. My bad.

    Peace,

    Eric

    Reply

Leave a comment

More posts