While criticizing President Obama for not understanding the separation of powers, Sen. Rand Paul demonstrated on Fox News Sunday a screwed up and irresponsible understanding of our constitution.
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Rand Paul was on Fox News Sunday campaigning for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination with bogus appeals to liberals on privacy and the NSA when he claimed that President Obama doesn’t understand the constitutional separation of powers. After a typical Fox News edited clip from Obama’s August 9 press conference, Paul said, “You know, I think the president fundamentally misunderstands the constitutional separation of powers, because the checks and balances are supposed to come from independent branches of government. So he thinks that if he gets some lawyers together from the NSA, and they do a Power Point presentation, and tell him everything’s okay, then the NSA can police themselves. But one of the fundamental things that our Founding Fathers put in place was they wanted to separate police power from the judiciary power, so they didn’t want police to write warrants. They wanted the judiciary, an independent, open, responsive judiciary responsive to the people with open debate in public. So I think the constitutionality of these programs needs to be questioned, and there needs to be a Supreme Court decision that looks at whether or not what they are doing is constitutional or not.”
Rand Paul got the problem with the NSA, FISA, Obama and the separation of powers completely wrong.
On August 9, Obama had it right when he announced:
First, I will work with Congress to pursue appropriate reforms to Section 215 of the Patriot Act — the program that collects telephone records. As I’ve said, this program is an important tool in our effort to disrupt terrorist plots. And it does not allow the government to listen to any phone calls without a warrant. But given the scale of this program, I understand the concerns of those who would worry that it could be subject to abuse. So after having a dialogue with members of Congress and civil libertarians, I believe that there are steps we can take to give the American people additional confidence that there are additional safeguards against abuse.
For instance, we can take steps to put in place greater oversight, greater transparency, and constraints on the use of this authority. So I look forward to working with Congress to meet those objectives.
Second, I’ll work with Congress to improve the public’s confidence in the oversight conducted by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, known as the FISC. The FISC was created by Congress to provide judicial review of certain intelligence activities so that a federal judge must find that our actions are consistent with the Constitution. However, to build greater confidence, I think we should consider some additional changes to the FISC.
One of the concerns that people raise is that a judge reviewing a request from the government to conduct programmatic surveillance only hears one side of the story — may tilt it too far in favor of security, may not pay enough attention to liberty. And while I’ve got confidence in the court and I think they’ve done a fine job, I think we can provide greater assurances that the court is looking at these issues from both perspectives — security and privacy.
So, specifically, we can take steps to make sure civil liberties concerns have an independent voice in appropriate cases by ensuring that the government’s position is challenged by an adversary.
Rand Paul wants to make the NSA concerns a matter between the executive and judicial branches of government. However, the real problem is in the legislative branch where Rand Paul is serving as a senator. The FISA court was neutered by the passage of the Patriot Act in 2001, and the FISA Amendments Act of 2008. Obama had it right. The thing that has to be done is that Congress has fix the problems they created when the gave George W. Bush anything he wanted to fight the “war on terror.”
The worst possible course of action would be to take this to the Supreme Court, because there is a decent chance that the Supreme Court would uphold these programs as constitutional because these powers were granted to the Executive Branch via legislation passed by Congress. (The Patriot Act is so vague and full of holes that it would be virtually impossible to credibly claim that it didn’t give the Executive Branch these powers.)
Sen. Paul wants a Supreme Court challenge because his wants to use it as a springboard for his 2016 presidential campaign.
I like to think of Rand Paul as a village idiot who runs roams the streets screaming about the constitution, but in reality the Kentucky senator has developed a heavily self-serving and very narrow knowledge of constitutional power.
It isn’t Obama that is misunderstanding the constitutional separation of powers. It’s Rand Paul, because he refuses to take any responsibility for fixing the legislation that led to these privacy concerns.
Rand doesn’t want to fix the problem. He just wants to be president. Sen. Paul knows buzzwords and has lots of opinions. He is woefully unintelligent, but he is a savvy politician who knows how to court his audience, and he is and he is using the NSA issue to try to sucker Americans who have real concerns about civil liberties and privacy into voting for him in 2016.
Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
