Remember when Barack Obama promised that his presidency would be defined by respect for the law and grounded in constitutional principles? Yeah, me neither.The main reason I suggested that conservatives should have been concerned about the criminal excesses of the previous administration is that power - and presidential power in particular - doesn't have a habit of contracting after a crisis, either real or imagined.
That being the case, my reasoning went, it was only a matter of time before the godless liberals picked up the expanded powers that reckless so-called conservatives have left behind. It then becomes very difficult for the Republicans who defended warrantless wiretapping and torture, both of which clearly violated existing statutes, to decry President Obama's extra-constitutional actions. It's very hard to argue that you can drown some Arab in a Thai or Polish "black site", but you can't fire the president of General Motors in the absence of enabling legislation.
Don't get me wrong, you can and everything. You'd just look awfully dickish.
And now it's come to this. We took the Internet from Al Gore, and Barack Obama is taking it back.
Essentially, the bill would all for the executive branch to essentially expropriate the cyber networks of private "critical" companies in a vaguely defined emergency. being classified as critical allows the government to impose heavy regulation and oversight on that company, including who it may or may not hire. It's a constitutional obscenity on almost every level, and just the sort of thing I've come to expect from Senator Jay Rockefeller.
Simply put, the government gets to take away private property in the absence of, oh, I dunno, a Declaration of War, and use it for its own ends. Nor does the Rockefeller bill determine what constitutes an emergency, who declares it, and under what legal or political authority.
To be fair, I should point out that the Democrats are actually going to the trouble of passing a law, which almost seems quaint these days. According to recent Republican thinking, that really isn't necessary.
One could make a pretty compelling case that cyber-attacks are acts of terrorism and therefore covered by the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists, which the Bush administration used to justify doing whatever they wanted. If that authorization allowed for the use of private companies to engage in potential assassinations, surely it would let Obama take over perezhilton.com for awhile.
The proposed bill is illegal and immoral in ways that only serial killers can truly appreciate, but that doesn't make a lick of fucking difference. The bar of what's legal and what's not in regards to executive power has been so lowered in recent years that it may as well not exist at all.
And now the most liberal government in American history gets their turn to limbo under it.
Far be it from me to say "I told you so", but....
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