That was a nice set of civil liberties we had there…

Here is the bill that will effectively give the administration the power to spy on American citizens (think: your phone calls, email, and internet usage) without accountability.  In other words, it’s not illegal if the president says it ain’t. No warrants. No courts. No questions. This isn’t conspiracy theory, this is really happening. (e.g. Act II of last week’s episode of This American Life.) And regardless of the fact that Democrats now control BOTH houses, it looks like this thing is still going to pass.  (I know it’s naive, but for a while I really thought they were going to derail it.)

I’ll leave the most of the commentary to  Glenn Greenwald, a constitutional lawyer and writer for salon.com who’s been sounding the alarm on this issue for a while now.  (If you haven’t already, seriously go read him now.) But I do wonder: what would Mrs. Kregness, my 9th grade civics teacher, say?

How do you even teach civics to kids these days?  Aside from all the other wrenches this administration has thrown at the constitution, I would think they’ve seriously undermined a civics teacher’s lesson on the system of checks and balances.

“But Mrs. Kregness!  You told us that the constitution was written to specifically to stop abuses of power.”

“Well, yes in theory it would…if the other people elected actually oppose those abuses.”

My parent’s generation saw Nixon get his comeuppance. (Well, sort of, if resigning in shame counts.) People my age grew up seeing the president getting impeached for perjury about a non-criminal act between two consensual adults–like, on a technicality–and even as redonkulous as that whole thing was, at least we saw the system in motion, goldangit!  But what if we have a generation of kids who grow up seeing there really aren’t consequences for very serious breaches of the law?  Will they–like I sometimes find myself doing–shrug their shoulders saying “well, that sucks but whachagonna do?” and wait for the next power-grab?

Yes, the constitution is malleable, is subject to ammendment and reinterpretation.  That’s why they call it a “living document.”  But what if you gut it of the very qualities that make it that way? What if everybody gets it wrong and nobody cares?  If the constitution is a living document, can you kill it? Kill it dead?

And lastly, I want to echo Greenwald: where’s Obama on this? He had been a vocal opponant of telecom imunnnity and supporterd of Sen. Dodd’s revision of the FISA bill.  I’m not in any way suggesting that Obama could wave his hand and make the problem go away (I know folks who hate when he’s characterized as some kind of Messiah, and so do I). But if he got the Democratic party to follow suit and reject money from lobbyists–no small feat–could he rally the party against this bill?