Posted on 09/30/2001 10:13:10 PM PDT by Benoit Baldwin
It may change slightly or in Clinton' case, grossly.
I note that you circumvented The Point so as to make a naive assumption about me. Here is The Point: The tell tale sign as to whether they are the fox is to ask yourself, "have they honestly come clean and sought and acted in an honest and consistent manner to identify the internal problems and how the facilitated the mess?" Has the occupant/Ashcroft or any of the above office holders done that? No. The fox is asking/demanding to guard the hen house with more of the same.
The problem must be accurately identified in the fullest sense with the all the facts gathered up to that point in time before an effective solution can be formulated.
Address The Point.
Additional understanding. "A" Point tactic is to address a smaller or secondary issue amongst a bigger issue in attempt to make the smaller "A" Point issue take the place of the larger Primary issue. The Point is the Primary issue and cannot be objectively replace by any "A" point issue. Anyone who uses an "A" point tactic should be given the benefit of the doubt that they made an honest error. If the person from that time onward into the future uses the "A" point tactic without acknowledging it as a secondary/smaller issue is intentionally trying to win a Primary issue argument by illegitimate means
how they facilitated the mess
Oh I get it. You want Bush and Ashcroft to dump the dirty laundry of the alphabet soup agencies in public view. In the middle of a war which will be so much easier for the enemies if they get a look at this dirty laundry. Makes perfect sense to me.
Ashcroft has NOT asked for warrantless searches. Those are proposals from a minority of Congress. Ashcroft has asked to do things such as allowing wire tap warrants to target all phones used by a given person.
If you have beefs about specific proposals that look like they are going to make it into law, fine. Beef away. But this whiney free floating complaint about statism is nauseating.
Is that the new code phrase now that "Living Document" is getting a bit old?
Congress can declare war now, and anyone found spying, or plotting terrorism will not have to have an airtight legal case built against them. They can be tried by a military tribunal and hanged without DoJ lawyers having to break a sweat.
Let these alphabet agencies, which have issued regulations giving illegals the same rights as citizens, simply rescind those regulations. That solves the legal problems Ashcroft claims to face right now.
If Ashcroft will simply admit that his LE agencies have been too busy with internal politicking and with waging war on citizens over unconstitutional gun laws and tax matters, he's halfway to fixing what's wrong with the DoJ.
That's what the Homeland Defense (which AFAIK is going to be a cabinet position, not an alphabet agency) is charged to do. It is charged to cut the gordian knot with respect to one problem -- attacks on domestic soil from foreign enemies.
The SCOTUS has begged to differ, complicating the problem. Recall the ruling a couple months back that most aliens targeted for deportation, whose home countries refuse to accept back, can NOT be held indefinitely? Our conviction standard of "beyond a reasonable doubt" when combined with this SCOTUS ruling and with the inability to issue a search warrant for all phones a given person uses, is going to bite us in the hind end royally when it comes to terrorism. In what IMHO was a grave oversight, the Constitution didn't bother to distinguish rights by citizenship. (The best answer to that problem would be a Constitutional amendment, but that process is like molasses in January. We are between a rock and a hard place.)
Note that the Constitution says nothing about "martial law." This comes about from the Constitutional authority of the Congress to decide the scope of the authority of the courts, and from laws (not constitutional provisions) which do just this in the case of a declaration of war. Maybe it will have to come down to this same authority in the case of terrorism -- declare a special terrorism court system. It would be Constitutional but most tinfoil hatters who are whining now about what Ashcroft wants would positively scream at such a move by Congress.
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