It bothers me that so many citizens and judges have accepted the convoluted idea that a piece of legislation passed by Congress overrides the U.S. Constitution.
We see it all the time, of course. Colleges think that their “safe spaces” override the free-speech clause of the Constitution. They don’t. All they do do is allow ignorant people to remain ignorant by refusing to consider opposing viewpoints. Why haven’t oversight boards fired such college administrators and put a stop to this nonsense?
Public high schools have reached even deeper into the barrel, punishing students for having the “wrong” viewpoint on political and social issues. Witness the student suspended for refusing to protest on the taxpayers’ dollar the leftist-supported gun bans. Oversight? What oversight?
But the worst offender, and the most dangerous, is Congress. Grandstanding hyenas on both sides of the aisle recently voted to renew – again – the phony, made-up FISA warrant crafted after 9/11 as a modification to the Constitution, without the bother of amending the Constitution.
The deep-state intelligence agencies, like most human creations, began with a laudable goal: Monitor our Cold War adversaries and their Cold War efforts to subvert our democratic republic. These efforts were real.
With the fall of the USSR, our primary Cold War enemy disintegrated into internal chaos. Victory, however, wasn’t enough for these agencies. They wanted world domination, and they had developed the early tools to achieve it.
Oddly enough, that was the same goal the USSR had evidenced before its collapse. By extending the monitoring techniques these agencies had used against a foreign enemy, then turning them inward against citizens, the agencies became rogue; a secret mercenary army targeting the very republic they had been created to serve.
For those who sought to remake the world in their own fallen image, these agencies, with their tools and techniques, were a gift from … at least one particular section of eternity. Those running these agencies would become “like God,” knowing everything about everyone, warrants and privacy be damned! In so doing they would create a more perfect union of their own design.
But that pesky U.S. constitutional requirement said that to rummage around in an American citizen’s papers and effects one had to present to a judge evidence of a crime having been committed. “Oh, Bother! We’ve been monitoring him forever! We know perfectly well what he is up to, and with whom!” Ah, the divine wisdom of those who wrote America’s founding documents! Because they understood human nature, they could see into the future, however indistinctly.
Our Congress, however, knew better. They developed a secret, fantasy court. It meets in secret, hears secret evidence, bases its decision only upon the word of a government prosecutor and in the end issues a secret warrant that is not presented to the defendant!
As this court was not like other courts, these warrants were not like other warrants. Warrants are to collect further evidence of a crime the police already have some evidence to suspect you have committed. They take that evidence to a judge, and he decides if they have enough evidence to disrupt your life.
But the warrant the government gets from the FISA Court is for evidence the government has already collected! They just want to attach your name to it and distribute it more widely! It is a complete and utter reversal of the Fourth Amendment, accomplished with the nearly total acquiescence of Congress.
As we know today, this was the process used by the Obama administration to set up a fake, Russian conspiracy story used to discredit the Republican presidential candidate and accomplish the election of an incredibly corrupt Democratic candidate, who was complicit in this process. The Constitution’s authors saw our era through a glass darkly, but they did see.
