Baldwin stands up for Constitution
There is an inclination, perhaps especially at the approach each year of the Fourth of July holiday, to believe the great struggles for freedom are a part of our history rather than the stuff of a current affairs quiz. But the Bush administration's attempt to rewrite the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in a manner that attacks our Fourth Amendment privacy rights confirms that the wisdom of Sam Adams remains as timeless as the promise of the American experiment.
"The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil Constitution, are worth defending at all hazards; and it is our duty to defend them against all attacks," the old revolutionary warned at the inception of our national endeavor. "We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors: They purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure and blood, and transmitted them to us with care and diligence. It will bring an everlasting mark of infamy on the present generation, enlightened as it is, if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle, or to be cheated out of them by the artifices of false and designing men."
What is to be celebrated with the greatest enthusiasm this Fourth of July is not the past, but the present.
While it is surely true that false and designing men occupy stations of public trust and power, and that they are conniving to wrestle our freedoms from us, it is equally true that we are still able to identify a few worthy heirs to the legacies of Sam Adams and his fellow members of the Continental Congress.
When the House of Representatives considered whether to retroactively legitimize Bush's warrantless wiretapping schemes -- and to immunize telecommunications corporations that violated the trust of their customers by cooperating with the illegal spying -- most members abandoned their oaths to protect and defend the Constitution. And Americans would be well advised to remove the offenders from their positions.
But, amid the disappointments, there were echoes of Sam Adams.
Our own representative, Tammy Baldwin, stood on the floor of the House and declared:
Two hundred and 22 years ago our nation's Founders enshrined in our Constitution the values and principles upon which our nation was founded, defining what it meant to be an American. Its first words, "We the people," make clear to all that our government derives its power from the people.
Our nation's Founders recognized that the full definition of what it meant to be an American required a clear statement of the protection of individual liberties. The protections enshrined in the Bill of Rights cannot be waived by the president and are not statutorily amendable by Congress. Those rights belong to the people -- they are, in part, what it means to be an American.
Since our founding, the world has looked to the United States as a beacon of freedom, a nation leading by example, a nation governed by the rule of law. As we act on this legislation, the world watches to see whether we as a nation still have a commitment to the very principles we seek to spread around the world.
There are those who see this legislation primarily in the context of granting retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies, merely transactional legislation. But, in fact, this is about something far more important and fundamental.
Today, this House seeks to legislatively amend the Fourth Amendment. This bill retroactively denies to Americans the protections of the Fourth Amendment. It retroactively insulates government from accountability for infringing upon one of the most basic rights of Americans.
This infringement is not theoretical. Today there are more than 40 pending lawsuits alleging that our government illegally and unconstitutionally violated the privacy rights of citizens by conducting a warrantless spying program. Through this bill, Congress now seeks to deny these individuals a remedy. Moreover, if this legislation becomes law, Americans may never learn the full extent of the Bush administration's illegal wiretapping program.
Further, the bill establishes a permanent framework for the violation of the civil liberties of our citizens. This legislation permits the government to conduct mass, untargeted surveillance of communications coming into and out of the United States, without any individualized review, and without any finding of wrongdoing. And it permits only minimal court oversight.
Some argue that this legislation is necessary to protect our nation from terrorists. I reject this argument. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which this bill seeks to amend, has, since 1978, provided a legal framework for law enforcement to secure a secret warrant to intercept electronic communications related to national security. In emergencies, the attorney general may authorize emergency employment of electronic surveillance as long as he or she makes the requisite application for approval from the FISA court as soon as practicable within 72 hours.
By authorizing a program to conduct illegal surveillance on Americans, the president and his attorneys general have chosen to ignore the law and the Constitution. Today by passing this legislation, Congress chooses to stand with the president.
By voting no, today I will stand with the American people in the defense of their civil liberties and their Constitution.
Along with Wisconsin's Russ Feingold, the Senate's stalwart champion of civil liberties, Baldwin represents not just her constituency but a commitment to the Constitution every bit as inspiring as that of the Founders she so eloquently recalls.
Tammy Baldwin
