Last November, Michael Mukasey stood in the Justice Department's Great Hall as he was sworn in as the new US Attorney General. Having been given the first opportunity to speak publicly to his staff, Mukasey said:
"We do law, but the result is justice. And that is why our ultimate client - the people of this country - can and do rest secure in the knowledge that our unswerving allegiance is to the law and the Constitution, and that the result of faithful performance of our duty is justice."
My, how times reveal the true nature of people; we've now all come to recognize Mukasey as the disappointment who refused to come out against waterboarding, squelching our hopes for a firm protector of the Constitution.
And it seems he's on a roll. Acting under Bush's wing as George rolls out his last-gasp efforts to leave us with history's most Constitutionally-overwritten legacy, Mukasey has signed on to a new Justice Department plan to loosen FBI restrictions to allow agents to open a national security or criminal investigation against someone without any clear basis for suspicion.
The New York Times reports on some of the details that have raised red flags for progressive leaders:
The new guidelines would allow the F.B.I. to open an investigation of an American, conduct surveillance, pry into private records and take other investigative steps “without any basis for suspicion.”
The plan “might permit an innocent American to be subjected to such intrusive surveillance based in part on race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, or on protected First Amendment activities.”
The guidelines also provide very limited constraints for how the FBI could share information with other agencies.
And there you have it: Bush is desperately trying to formalize in stone his administration's efforts to wipe out civil liberties in exchange for a false sense of security, and Mukasey's along for the ride. Never mind that the crumbling economy leaves us as vulnerable as ever to all kinds of large-scale disasters; the Bush administration has succeeded in changing the face of conservatism from the people who tell us to fear the government, to the people who are determined to give us something to fear the government about. And they want to make sure that these practices stick around when Bush is back in Crawford.
Luckily, the hope that there are virtuous defenders of the Constitution in our leadership is not lost: a team of four Democratic Senators have issued a letter to Mukasey, warning him that the plan threatens to undermine Constitutionally-mandated civil liberties. Signers Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island told Mukasey they were troubled by what they heard in the briefing session on the plan.
The efforts of this Democratic tag team to stand up for civil liberties should be applauded, but we can't forget the past examples of our Democratic leaders backing down too quickly on these issues. Let us take a lesson from the civil liberties disaster of the FISA bill and recognize the importance of putting the pressure on these Senators to follow through on what they started. We need to tell them that the American public not only supports their efforts to protect us against such intrusive and un-American policies, we expect and demand that they don't back down on this. Not this time.
