Charlie Pierce:
Watching this unfold revealed an aspect of the prion disease that has afflicted the Republican Party ever since Ronald Reagan first fed it the monkeybrains in the 1980s. Right now, the Republicans in Congress are staking their case on particularly unpopular positions. Both the DACA beneficiaries and the CHIP program are enormously popular and, needless to say, so are the members of the military, whom the Republicans have been using as human shields to the point at which Senator Tammy Duckworth, Democrat of Illinois, who lost both legs in Iraq, decided that this was something up with which she would put no longer, and she rolled out the Enola Gay. [...]
In most political contexts, when your policies become unpopular, you change the policies. However, in the context of the prion disease, as the Republican policies became unpopular, the more they work to discredit, obviate, or destroy the vehicles by which that unpopularity can find voice. This is not the way a credible democratic republic survives. But this is the only political instinct to which the congressional Republican majorities respond. The prion disease has robbed the party of the options that might have been presented by the higher functions that the prion disease has destroyed. The latest symptomatic manifestation is the out-and-out fascist tone of the latest web ad produced by the administration*.
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On this date at Daily Kos in 2009—Obama Administration Sides with Bush’s DOJ in Spy Case:
A sensitive civil liberties case that has been working its way through the courts for nearly four years is in the news again as the Obama administration "fell in line with the Bush administration Thursday when it urged a federal judge to set aside a ruling in a closely watched spy case weighing whether a U.S. president may bypass Congress and establish a program of eavesdropping on Americans without warrants." The case involves the now-defunct, Oregon-based Saudi charity, the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation.
According to David Kravets at Wired:
With just hours left in office, President George W. Bush late Monday asked U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker to stay enforcement of an important Jan. 5 ruling admitting key evidence into the case.
Thursday's filing by the Obama administration marked the first time it officially lodged a court document in the lawsuit asking the courts to rule on the constitutionality of the Bush administration's warrantless-eavesdropping program. The former president approved the wiretaps in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
"The Government's position remains that this case should be stayed," the Obama administration wrote in a filing that for the first time made clear the new president was on board with the Bush administration's reasoning in this case.
Given that it has adopted the Bush administration's position in this case, the question now to be answered is what role "unitary executive" philosophy will play in the Obama administration.
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