Trump’s power is shakier than American democracy

Trump is a slow learner but he has already enacted a sea change in US politics in regard to the role of the military, delegating them a political role more like imperial Japan than even Eisenhower’s Cold War “McCarthyism,” or Nixon’s crypto-Ruritanian White House. The generals’ reluctance to risk delivering victories does I think play an unspoken importance in the current situation.

All the Trump normalizers in my opinion are still falsifying the issues with the Trump presidency, by highlighting the continuities with previous Republican and Democratic administrations. Why would anyone expect Trump to be creative? Of course he’s mostly going to be copying, especially since he doesn’t really have a party base. Things that are different about Trump: Again, the open militarization of the administration; the extension of the old tactic of starving social programs in order to label them failed, to a strategy of denying any political interference by trashing government administration itself; open and direct personal threats against other political elites in the best style, copied from the decline of the Athenian democracy and the Roman republic; the open reliance on threats of nuclear genocide. From Harvey Weinstein to Jeffrey Epstein and Bill Clinton…Maureen Dowd, Ross Douthat and Jacobin have already sketched out the path to reversing Clinton’s acquittal. There are three more years to go, how could any but a fool or a liar be sure that Trump won’t live down to his tweets.

It is now commonplace to rehabilitate Nixon as a liberal, whose fall was apparently some sort of weirdly pointless exercise in hysteria. The OP has rediscovered how untrue this is, but I am not at all clear on why anyone would require that Trump be more openly victorious in one year than Nixon was. The defeat of the voting commission for instance, is not necessarily a Republican party repudiation of Trump. There are pre-existing laws about the release of voting data that stood in the way. Most of all, who says this is the final defeat?

Look, as far as the Nixon precedent goes, when the “McCarthyite” purges that created Nixon and others took place, prudent minds thought then the raving about fascism was hysteria, Chicken Littles crying about the falling sky. But, the savage turn to the right marked by the Cold War, the start of a murderous crusade that killed millions worldwide and permanently excised the Left from mass politics in the US, may not have aped Nazis. There’s not a reason why it should. Unlike Weimar Germany, the Col Warriors were operating from victory, not defeat. Makes a big, big difference. But it was good enough for government work.

This sea change in the US introduced a political logic, momentum for a post-democratic order. The phrase “there is a lot of ruin in a country” is popular around here, not least because it’s true. Nixon tried to carry the program further, but got slapped down. Trump is carrying out an updated program, but instead of getting slapped down, only criticism from the right is acceptable. I think it’s because the real powers want a strong man to save their empire from threats. An exclusive focus on domestic politics is wrong, a diversion from the complete picture. The OP’s implicit premise that Trump would need to imitate Hitler would be baffling otherwise.

Again, of course Trump is politically “weak,” because he conducted a hostile takeover of the Republican Party, because he’s not doing customary politics, because it takes time to undermine the old government. I think all this could easily be expected to change if Trump’s generals deliver an easy victory that Makes America Great Again. And they could change even worse if the generals’ can’t deliver, if people think they should be fighting a rerun of Adolf Hitler.

Don’t Donk partisans always compare the leading GOP politician of the day to Hitler? I’ll swear I read nearly identical pieces on this very site twelve years ago.

PGD: “But the Hitler-talk sticks around because it serves a purpose, and that’s to divert anti-Trump energies from genuine reform of the institutions that are so rotten that a grotesque con man like Trump was able to come to power.”

The Hitler-talk sticks around because it is true. Arguing that Trump won’t be able to effectively act on or succeed in his authoritarian anti-democratic impulses doesn’t mean those impulses aren’t real or that he isn’t trying to carry them out. If there is a secret conspiracy to falsely argue that Trump is a would-be dictator, for the purposes of keeping the masses enslaved to the status quo, somehow I never got the memo, so you’ll have to fill me in on the dress code and the secret handshake.

Anarcissie: “But, folks, Trump does mean what he says, just as Hitler did, there are many people who support his principles if not his act, and the resistance to him has so far been weak, stylistic and superficial. ”

I agree with this, including the point about the weakness of the resistance, given that his party does not resist him and his party controls all the institutions of power. For those of you in the ‘he can’t or won’t succeed because the institutions constrain him’ camp, please describe for me the thing or things he might do that will be too much for the Republicans in the House or Senate, and cause them to rein him in or stop him. I can’t think of anything offhand – they seem determined to let him do what he wants as long as he signs the bills he sends them.

Re the epilogue: The Dems who voted to re-authorize FISA Section 702 (or whatever the number is) did so b/c they were persuaded that the intel agencies ‘need’ it in its current form, i.e. that it is crucial to their being able to carry out one of their missions, namely detection of terrorist plots. Whether that is correct is a separate question, but if X is persuaded of that, X cd also be persuaded that Trump is a blankety-blank-blank, and there is no necessary contradiction between the two positions. (Though there may be some tension.)

LFC
“b/c they were persuaded that the intel agencies ‘need’ it in its current form”

I’d give them a little situational awareness than that. They know its bunk, or at least that the trade off between safety and liberty is lopsided. But, they also “know” that if they don’t support it their political enemies will paint them as terrorist enablers. So they grit their teeth and vote for it anyway.

Trump is closer to Hindenburg than Hitler.

Okay, Hindenburg without the history of past accomplishments. Those accomplishments were probably mostly Ludendorf’s anyway, so maybe it is a good analogy.

Trump is pretty clearly a place-holder in a power vacuum. It becomes more and more clear that he doesn’t really control anything, that he signs whatever his handlers put in front of him. Big talk, at least in part as compensation for really small action.

So far, there doesn’t seem to be much court intrigue over who gets to put pieces of paper in front of him to sign. The Congressional Rs don’t really want to do much beyond lower the taxes the owners pay, and that’s been done already. No faction has emerged within the WH that seems to be trying for control of Trump for any purpose other than self-preservation, keeping Trump from further shooting himself and his administration in the foot and landing them all in jail. If that pattern holds, his tenure in office will not be very eventful.

If we do see a faction emerge trying or succeeding at using control of Trump as their path to power, they would almost certainly have to be fascists. Trump could probably not be controlled in the limited support he has to provide (signing things and occasional public appearances under controlled conditions) by a faction that wants to use his presidency to get anything done but a fascist program. They would need Fox and Friends mainlining praise into Trump 24/7 to keep him signing things, and Fox and Friends isn’t going to get jacked enough to hype squad for any other sort of program.

Trump doesn’t have talent, work ethic or attention to politics and public policy sufficient to be a Hitler. But he does sit on a power vacuum, and could be used by people who have those qualities, to embark on a fascist project.

I usually think of the comparison with Hitler in the context of American politics as a denial mechanism. It shifts the viewpoint from America’s own rich history of genocide and apartheid, projects it on a monster other country, and lets the U.S. slide. Instead of Hitler, how about comparison with Bush and the Bush culture? Which is much more pertinent. I was struck, during the discussion of Trump’s shithole nation remark, that nobody seemed to draw the parallel to similar remarks that popped up during the Bush attempt to get the U.N. to endorse the U.S. invading Iraq. Here, for instance, is a Krauthammer piece which in effect says what are AFRICAN nations doing telling us what to do? It is the very same idea. And it has governed U.S. foreign policy since, well, forever. Trump, as H. Rap Brown might say, is as American as apple pie. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/2003/02/28/a-costly-charade-at-the-un/eedaede7-017e-4d89-9a9d-c18099744076/?utm_term=.bac1e12e755b

I think we should distinguish between fascism and authoritarianism.

The U.S. and maybe the whole world is sliding slowly into a stronger secret security apparatus in response to violent threats foreign and domestic, real and imagined. This has been going on for decades and of course it can be used for authoritarian purposes.

Fascism on the other hand is a spontaneous emotional “move” in response to a widespread failure of the market economy. It comes from within individuals spontaneously, and turns into a political regime. There isn’t necessarily a big vanguard. This is Karl Polanyi’s definition (replete with real world examples) from chapter 20 of The Great Transformation (1944).

The U.S. has avoided fascism this time, because the economy is visibly getting better. It is still sliding into authoritarianism along with the rest of the world.

But the vehemence of the Trump voters shows that the U.S. democracy is not immune to an emotion which might sweep away institutional constraints. It just didn’t happen this time. Who knows about next time?

The national security state isn’t at all the same thing as Trump, and not so much like the Hitler movement either. More like the Bakufu in pre-Meiji Japan in intention, but not yet so accomplished. Everybody thinks it’s ok to be actively vigilant against external threats; the thought here seems to be that it’s costly but possible to create an island where greater moral purity can prevail: law, order, and a reasonable profit margin. It worked for the daimyo for a long time. 250 years!

Trump could have had his Brownshirts. They were demonstrating right here in town, rolling coal at Resisters and whatnot. He chose not to call them out, which was probably self-preservative, and I think that danger has passed. Instead he chose to act as a Billionaire. Hitler wasn’t in it for the money, and it seems he was made of tougher stuff. Bannon or Somebody would have taken the wheel and it would have got real bad. A fun counterfactual is what Trump would have done had he lost.

Trump can’t be understood as a conventional politician who has a coherent vision of a policy which is accessible to all citizens, the way the idealized forms of liberalism and conservatism are.
Instead his entire appeal is white cultural identity, like Coates termed him , the first president for whom whiteness is his overriding identity.

Ethnic resentment doesn’t have an economic program, a foreign policy other than fear and rage, and can’t offer any set of suggestions for the nuts and bolts of governance such as the legal system or physical infrastructure.
Which is why the Republican Party used white resentment as a tool to mask their actual political program of reaction.

When liberals ask why Kansans vote against their interests, we get the question wrong. They aren’t voting against their interest- enshrining white culture as supreme IS their interest; suffering the predations of the oligarchy is just the price they are willing to pay.

Contrary to the media and academic discourse, there’s more precarity to Trump’s regime than there is to American democracy.

Sure, the betting odds are that American democracy will outlive Trump — something uncontradicted by Yglesias or Chait. But I’m glad people understand that just because democracy has powerful and effective defenders doesn’t mean we ought not worry.

When you point out that Trump is not identical to Hitler, you seem to be engaged in an elementary misreading of Yglesias et al. Nothing in Yglesias’ piece suggests that he thinks the first concentration camps have opened, or that the US has imported German conditions circa 1934 — or that he is unaware of those conditions. Even taken out of context, the quote you supply is crystal clear that Yglesias doesn’t find the US in 2018 the equivalent of Germany then. (What other possible reading is there of the word “even” in “even Hitler?”)

Chait’s view — even the view that you quote out of context — is unrebutted in your piece. Chait says: ” “I read ‘How Democracies Die.’ It convinced me our democracy is more precarious than it looks.”

Is Chait predicting that American democracy will die? That it’s death is more likely than not? That Trump is already Hitler, or that he is likely to become Hitler?

No. This is a new iteration of the same problem you had during the election. You found Trump’s election impossible, and encouraged people to worry instead about matters that you found more interesting.

It is one thing to say that Trump’s election is extremely unlikely. Many people — most people, I’d guess — who were extraordinarily worried about Trump believed that he was likely to lose.

You seem to think that your error was in underestimating Trump’s odds. That’s not it. The error was not recognizing the task at hand, which was to make sure Hillary was elected. You expended a lot of energy trying to persuade people that they were worried about the wrong thing, just because that thing probably wasn’t going to happen.

And you do it again here.

First off let me praise Corey Robin on his excellent article in the Guardian as well as this post at Crooked Timber. I see parallels of Hitler – like fascism in Trump to much less an extent than he does, but there are parallels in behaviors. My understanding of Hitler was that he was addicted to methamphetamine or whatever speed was called back then – benzedrine, dexedrine, amphetamine; my freshman psychology class in college warned us of the destructive properties of these drugs on the outer cerebral cortex. DT is in the early stages of dementia from Alzheimer’s. The dendrites that are the cells of the brain that stretch out to neighboring cells instead curl up into little balls, detached from the rest of the brain. The body lives on, relying on the brain stem and other primitive neural structures we have in common with our animal ancestors. DT is relying on his lizard brain to make executive decisions. Anger, uncontrolled racism as well as other lack of impulse control are symptoms. I just lived through years of it in a family member.

And like the Pres**tent, Capitalism itself is going through it’s dying phase, relying on it’s lizard brain as the rest of us drop out or are excluded from the economy. Capitalism tries on it’s fascist suit when it pleases the wealthy to scare the masses or threaten them with war. But we’ve had sixteen years of it and we won’t tolerate much more. So even though Trump wants to be a fascist he hasn’t the brains nor the infrastructure in place to do so. Steven Miller is no Joseph Goebbels. He’s more like Pauley Shore.

The infrastructure for fascism operates independently from the DT. So when the press gets the okay to link one with the other the press is not looking in the mirror to see it’s own culpability. Here’s a way to see if your source of news is a propaganda device: is there a forum for an exchange of ideas, or is it just a one direction thing. If it’s the latter it is a house of cards based on shaky ideology that crumbles in the critical eye. No Truth-in? No Truth-out. The Daily Beast is a caged animal to be observed and pitied like a lion in a zoo. And places that censor POV shouldn’t have the name democratic in their handle, DU.

Let’s see. Adolf Hitler: father was a minor bureaucrat and farmer; unsuccessful artist; fought in World War I; one of the earliest members of the Nazi Party; attempted a putsch; sent to prison; wrote Mein Kampf, a political tract; party had a violent paramilitary wing; chosen chancellor by the legislature; shut down the free press; centralized control of the economy in the government through many regulations; had millions of Jews murdered.

Donald Trump: father was a real estate mogul; businessman and reality TV star; avoided the Vietnam War era draft; member of the Democratic Party and later the Republican Party, two of the oldest political parties in the world; donor to Democratic and Republican politicians alike; litigious; had The Art of the Deal, a business and personal memoir, ghostwritten for him; elected president by voters through the Electoral College; gripes about the press on Twitter; has reduced regulations in a number of areas of the economy; one of his closest advisers is his Jewish son-in-law.

Yep, the parallels are ominous.

fastusnotes@:

2. Although Section 702 has been around for years, I have yet to see anyone from the Intercept, Human Rights Watch or the Electronic Frontiers Foundation identify a single domestic victim of the program. EFF has some court cases pending but there are no victims identified in those cases and some of them are likely to be thrown out due to lack of standing. Has the FSA dragnet actually led to a single domestic victim, and if so how and under what circumstances?

How would we know? Parallel construction has been specifically practiced to conceal that sort of thing, and its past use (and completely plausible future (or recent past) classified resumption) makes clear that the responsible agencies are entirely willing to omit reporting use of 702, regardless of the administration in office.

– and as a German-American -(with jewish relatives) – this pointing out that Trump is ”no Hitler” really bothers me – and it bothers me even more that when I point to it – that such a comment gets deleted on Crooked Timber – and nearly all funny nonsense I post stays?

What is happening with you guys?

I hate when people distort internet traditions. Godwin’s Law said, “As any thread on the internet continues, the probability that Nazis will be mentioned approaches 1.” It was a simple observation about the nature of internet discussions. It was not “meant to put a check on the reductio ad Hitlerum.” It did not say that calling somebody a Nazi was bad. It just said, “Hey, I notice that the longer any thread goes on the more likely it is that somebody is going to refer to Nazis.”

I’m not sure how much the two sides on the left are even engaging each other in this discussion anymore. At this point these arguments are maybe just an indicator of the speaker’s viewpoint and not much more. Corey Robin didn’t think Trump was abnormal for a Republican (or just represented a linear progression from Goldwater) and doesn’t think he’s unusual now. But I hold almost the opposite viewpoint. Trump’s style of management is to install people personally loyal to himself. That’s the only criteria that matters. The only limitation is his ability to find capable such people to install in executive offices and his personal staff. But over time this is the general trend. It leads to a more and more vulnerable democracy over time. Trump didn’t come out of nowhere (one way to view it is he is the Fox News president), but he does represent a stark difference from even the Bush presidency to my view. The Republican congress has shown no interest in checking Trump’s administrative preferences. No doubt they think they can control him and get the legislation they wanted. Reference to Hitler are not helpful because of how much rhetorical weight they carry. But this is a very dangerous path the federal government is following. If the Dems don’t retake either Senate or House in 2018, the republic could be in a lot of trouble. And saying Trump’s political fortunes are shakier than democracy in America… that’s pretty cold comfort! What, I should rejoice because it’s not a coin toss? Every presidency ends eventually –
democracy has to survive each and every administration. That we are even talking about the strength of American democracy at this stage is a sign of the danger.

Z: “ I admit that left me quite speechless.”

Perhaps it was overstated. It’s a reaction to the (near-constant) chatter to the effect that both sides are the same. They aren’t. One side trumps up intelligence to build a fraudulent case to invade Iraq, and the other doesn’t. One side seeks relentlessly to disenfranchise voters, and the other doesn’t. One side is committed to destroying the social welfare state, and the other isn’t. One side bends the rules in the Senate to get what they want, or prevent what they don’t want, and the other doesn’t. One side runs on an openly racist platform, and the other doesn’t. I can see the problems with the Democratic Party, but they are not the same.

@ OP
>As I said, I don’t know what to conclude.

I’ll be the one to say it, then. The Dem establishment, especially those ‘resisters’ who are most vehement about the whole Russia-Trump thing, are loyal spokespersons of the US imperial establishment and deep ‘national security state’; far from being opposed to authoritarianism, they are actually adherents of it, as long as the right people are the ones in authority, and their problem with Trump is mostly that he is: a. a political competitor (unlike Obama), and, probably, b. differs from them in his precise level of commitment to anti-Russian foreign policy (unlike the neocons). They also prioritise the general principle of authoritarian curtailment of the civil liberties of their own people via the security apparatus even over the fight against temporary political competitors who are less committed to anti-Russian foreign policy. This is also partly due to the fact that they judge them to be weak and not much of a threat. That those engaging in scaremongering about Russia are not concerned with civil liberties is confirmed by the fact that, as Yan points out, in other countries, the hysteria about Russian propaganda and ‘fake news’ is used directly to curtail civil liberties, enact censorship and silence viewpoints opposed to the *mainstream*, dominant propaganda of the establishments of these countries. All of which is not to say that the Russian establishment and its propagandists aren’t authoritarian, reactionary, cynical and murderous scum in their own right. The world would be too nice a place if they weren’t.

Of course, Dems’ belief that Trump is weak and a negligible threat is not proof that he really is. Those who allowed or actively helped the Nazi monster to grow because of their anti-Communist priorities didn’t expect it to get out of hand either. Still, the situation and the immediate future perspectives just don’t seem very dramatic. Trump is partly a somewhat more extreme Republican and partly a disgraceful cleptocrat. As far as symbols are concerned, I suppose he has normalised racism further (which may contribute to a climate where more clearcut fascist phenomena might emerge at a later point), but the fertile ground for such things is present, he is just one symptom of the disease. As for what he is doing *in practice*, most of the worst things that he is doing would have been done by any of the other viable Republican candidates. After the truly massive encroachments and horrors of the Bush Jr era, this panicking reminds me of ‘first as a tragedy, then as a farce’. Bush Jr was farcical, too, but he was of the establishment, and there was real and terrible stuff going on behind the comedic front; so far (knock on wood) there seems to be little beyond the farce and some rather mundane business as usual in Trump’s case. Republicans gonna Republican; the decisive thing was really the way Obama’s 8 years in-between the two GOP clowns played out.

Contra Prof. Robin, Trump’s first year in office has done much to illuminate how dependent American democracy is upon unwritten norms of political conduct.

No law requires a candidate or the president to release their income tax records. Apart from the vague and toothless Emoluments Clause there are few formal restraints on using the White House for self dealing and personal enrichment. Judicial nominees have been expected to have some actual intellectual capability and at least a pretense of honoring precedent. No formal prohibition prevents Trump’s administration from purging scientists from regulatory agencies and replacing them with shills from regulated industries. The Republican party’s willingness to abandon all principles and norms renders democracy impotent. The people can petition, march and protest freely but to what audience, to what effect? Even when laws and regulations exist they are not self-enforcing; someone in power needs to bring an action.

Trump himself has no ideology other than self gratification, a characteristic shared by many of his family, advisors and appointees. Why pretend to political norms when their only interest is in looting the country? The reality of their actions means nothing to Trump supporters who now simply deny reality, eliminating another check upon administration actions.

I am not yet to the point of some friends who believe the American experiment in democracy is coming to an end but I do fear it is badly damaged. The 2018 elections will say a lot about whether we are headed for recovery or life support.

– and about ”a deeper analysis of the surveillance state”?
That is desperately needed – as the superficial ”Analyse” to see in ”governmental surveillance” the major problem and NOT in the state of surveillance by something ”ironiously” called ”social media” – and ”the machine” I’m currently typing these words – while Crooked Timber is surveilling where I’m typing them from – and could – with a few hacker-tricks tell the whole wide world -(and not just a few bored ”surveillers” in ”the homeland”) that I had steak with potato-gratin in the Hexenküche on sunday…

mpowell @36 but [Trump] does represent a stark difference from even the Bush presidency to my view.

How so? (Honest question, really, I would like you to spell it out).

The way I see it, there is not much political difference either in style, practice or theory between Tump’s presidency and Bush’s, especially when it comes to appointing hacks and pretending horrendous mismanagements were triumphs (Mission accomplished anyone? Exceptional rendition anyone? Harriet Miers anyone?). However, and here I think my analysis disagrees with Corey Robin’s, I think the American society has changed, so that comparable political behaviors don’t have quite the same effects. Bush’s presidency could be thought of as the usual R/D alternance whereas the Trump presidency is the first one to very visibly emanate from the populist/nativist side of John Quiggin’s three party system. So it feels different, and it could indeed be a different social phenomena. But politically, perhaps not so much.

Dr. Hilarius @42 I am not yet to the point of some friends who believe the American experiment in democracy is coming to an end

The American experiment in democracy is long dead. Is the will of the people the basis of government? Are citizens equal before the law or endowed with equal political power? Is the government representative of the people? Even the questions sound like sick jokes. Retrospectively, I would put the time of death at December 12, 2000 but in 2018, I don’t see how can one still speak of American democracy as something that exists.

J-D, what you say is certainly true, but I think there is something else going on in this case. From a legislative perspective Trump is fairly ordinary. But policy is not one-dimensional nor is it limited to tax and spend legislation. I will just come back to the point that if you think democracy still has better than even odds against Trump’s administration and therefore nothing unusual – you are setting the bar too low (or concerned about the wrong things).

Hitler analogies are notoriously overused, and in this case don’t fit very well.

But surely in this case we should be thinking of Stalin?

Not that Trump is like Stalin, but rather that the Stalin-era surveillance machinery outlived the fall of the Soviet Union, with the KGB being replaced with the FSB et al, until the time came when they came within a whisker of taking over the US by stealth.

Trump’s role in this is what they used to call a “useful idiot”.

The problem with the Trump/Hitler analogies comes down, in my view, to the fact that the fascists are not just the people that this administration has installed in positions of power; the fascists are the entirety of the Republican party, and have been for some time. A Ted Cruz or a Marco Rubio or, god forbid, a Tom Cotton would do everything that Trump is doing, but they’d do it wearing a well-fitting suit and speaking in complete sentences. Cotton in particular is a dead-eyed psychopath champing at the bit to murder millions of Iranians, but because he went to Harvard, he’s considered “normal.”

Trump is just the person who has been able to ride a particular wave that brought together white resentment and petit bourgeois class anxiety just long enough to get himself elected. It turns out that you can just say the quiet parts loud now; a Rubio or a Cruz didn’t know you could do that (they’re evil but unimaginative dullards), but Trump didn’t care. But it turns out that most Republicans don’t care either; that’s why they’re Republicans, after all. Trump couldn’t have won had all of these upstanding citizens, who no doubt see themselves as decent people, actually had the courage of their convictions, but it turns out that the vague promise of tax cuts and the less-vague (and now being fulfilled) promises of ethnic cleansing are more than enough to get your average boomer to sign over their children’s future to a gang of looters.

It’s too early to judge whether democratic institutions can survive the wholesale takeover of the federal government by, effectively, a minority right-wing party. I suspect a dismantling of this caliber will, to paraphrase Hemingway, happen very slowly and then all at once. Maybe it won’t happen at all, we should be so lucky, but the damage being done right now by the installation of conservative judges, the incipient sell-off of public lands, and the dismantling of regulations both environmental and financial, just to pick a few examples, is real and lasting. Maybe we can recover from that, but it’s going to be like recovering from a recession.

Separately, I want to briefly address the commenters here who are incredulous at the idea that we should hold Democrats responsible for collaborating with e.g. the security state. Here I’ll take up the specific example of the 55 Democrats did who voted against the USA Rights amendment to the FISA reauthorization bill, but we could just as well talk about how Democrats are collaborating to loosen banking regulations. See, here’s the thing about that: Republicans are evil, and we know that; we can of course condemn the evil, but at a certain point it just becomes a waste of time and energy. Does anyone expect them to do anything differently? Do you expect the comic book villain to not engage in comic book villainy? I should hope not. Democrats are, at least ostensibly, the liberal party; therefore, the aim should be to make them actually act like it. Voting for the garbage above stands in direct contradiction to all the things that the party claims to be for (and, importantly, what a lot of the electorate actually wants), and the odds are better that you’ll be able to pressure someone into doing the right thing than they are that you can change anything by pointing at the bad people and yelling about how bad they are.

@49
”Kurt Schuler,

Thank you, that is a useful comment. Someone needed to point out the real nature of the trouble that we are in and you did it brilliantly”

Not as ”brilliantly” as the famous American Philosopher Jon Stewart who suggested that ”Von Clownstick” should embrace ”his heritage” – and I’m also able to pick all kind of non-similarities and similarities between Hitler and Von Clownstick including the point that Hitler never was a ”Von” like a Count ”von Stauffenberg” who tried to kill Hitler –
but anyhoo the ”brilliant” advice to embrace ”FF von Clownsticks heritage” always said it all – not only with Trump – supposedly embracing the heritage from the beginning with loving Hitlers ”Mein Kampf”.

And that’s ”the thing” – actually also ”the very good thing” – as Trumps ”power” had grown so much that it created the perfect backlash to the ”Von Clownsticks” – at least firstly in Europe and now – how it looks like – also in my ”Heimatland” the US.

mpowell
As far as I can tell, you and I are writing about different and unrelated topics. In your comment you refer to what Trump is like from a legislative perspective. I wrote nothing about what Trump is like from a legislative perspective. In your comment you wrote about policy. I made no reference to policy. You refer to democracy’s odds against Trump’s administration; I wrote nothing about democracy. And yet uou frame your comment as if it is supposed to be a response to mine; I’m blessed if I understand how it can be.

– and in conclusion –
couldn’t we be honest? –
that this idea that ”Trump’s power is shakier than American democracy” is kind of an… ”excuse”? for… let’s call it – ”tolerating” Trump – because some of US – when Trump pretended to be ”anti-establishment” or ”anti-mainstream” – or even funnier:
When some of the ”naivest” among US – believed that the FF was ”fighting some ”surveillance” or ”deep state” – and he actually was ready to surveil and fight everybody of US who wouldn’t agree with him just the way regular ”fascists” like to do it.

And the fact that he actually can’t do what he probably read in ”Mein Kampf” to US –
BE-cause ”our” democracy is far less shakier than his power is – doesn’t excuse – with pointing to the fact that he isn’t Hitler – the belief – that he in any way or any time couldn’t be the ”FF von Clownstick” he always was and always will be.

Z

The American experiment in democracy is long dead. Is the will of the people the basis of government? Are citizens equal before the law or endowed with equal political power? Is the government representative of the people? Even the questions sound like sick jokes. Retrospectively, I would put the time of death at December 12, 2000 but in 2018, I don’t see how can one still speak of American democracy as something that exists.

If somebody says that none of the following things are true in America today: the will of the people is the basis of government; citizens are equal before the law and are endowed with equal political power; the government is representative of the people — then I think I understand what is meant. But if you believe those things are not true now, then I don’t understand what would lead you to believe that they were true in some period before December 12, 2000. The way it appears to me, if those things were ever true, they’re still true now; but if they’re not true now, then they never were. There’s a limited sense in which it’s accurate to say that the United States was a democracy, but in that limited sense it still is one; on the other hand, there’s a more expansive sense of the word in which the United States is not a democracy, but in that sense it never was. What I can’t figure out a case for is the idea that the United States was once a democracy but isn’t any more. To make out a case for that idea, you need to validate not just one historical evaluation, but two: (i) that the country is not a democracy now; (ii) that the country was a democracy at some period in the past. I think the only way that can be done is by the fallacy of equivocation, using two different definitions of democracy for parts (i) and (ii).

@46
“But politically, perhaps not so much.”

Leaving aside the style issues that people seem so obsessed with, everything Trump’s done in the real world is virtually indistinguishable from what any other GOP POTUS would have done. Biggest one was the tax cut, of course. Appointed a standard issue conservative to Scalia’s seat. Made a show of attempting to repeal Obamacare. Talked tough on North Korea. Lobbed some cruise missiles into Syria on the thinnest of pretexts. Ironically, the one consequential thing he’s done that another Republican might not have is the embassy move to Jerusalem, ironic because almost everybody in both parties was on record as being in favor of it.

I don’t agree with people who say that Trump is a fascist because the GOP has long been fascist, for reasons Corey Robin touched on in his Guardian piece, but they are at least being consistent.

@63
”See… nastywoman 01.15.18 at 10:54 am 33”

Pointing out that US Republicans sank the bill with their majority and NOT Dems is NOT being ”incredulous at the idea that we should hold Democrats responsible for collaborating with e.g. the security state”?

And about NOT being a ”Fellow American”.

My bad – and let me correct:

Commenters who believe that ”The Dem establishment, especially those ‘resisters’ who are most vehement about the whole Russia-Trump thing, are loyal spokespersons of the US imperial establishment and deep ‘national security state” might (finally) want to notice that ”our problem” -(a YUUUGE part of the ”female” US population) is NOT about some ”political competitor” or all the other ”problems” some Commenters from Eastern Europe (might) like to believe in.

and this:

”I don’t agree with people who say that Trump is a fascist because the GOP has long been fascist…”

– is kind of… confusing? –
as when you believe the GOP ”has long been ”fascist” and Trump was running as a GOP candidate –
doesn’t that imply – that you also should believe that ”Trump is a fascist”? –
and if the confusion is based on ideas that Trump also believes other ”stuff” – than all ”the stuff”… which is by definition ”Fascistic”… isn’t that where this whole… confusion comes from?

As I already mentioned – that some of our Fellow? Americans might have overlooked his ”Fascism” BE-cause he at the same time pretended also to be ”ant-mainstream” and ”anti-establishment”?

Just before Trump’s inauguration, I read a trashy old 80s thriller called “Ikon” by Graham Masterton. In amongst all the sex scenes and shoot-outs, we get a plot in which American patriots circa 1983 suddenly realise their country lost the Cuban Missile Crisis and has been secretly controlled by a KGB branch in DC ever since.

It’s a book whose time has come. Get it while copies are still available for 1p on Amazon Marketplace.

F. Foundling: “One word: Libya.”

I’m afraid I can’t grast your point when you use only one word. You’ll have to say more about how Libya is / was like Iraq. Trumped-up evidence? The claim that Libya was responsible for 9/11? An invasion by US forces designed to destroy the stable government and usher in chaos? An armed occupation married to no occupation plan at all? The desire to punish Iraq for embarrassing the President’s father once upon a time? None of those seem to fit, so I’m guessing you mean something else. Something of the form ‘Iraq was a bad decision, and Libya was a bad decision, therefore Iraq and Libya were identical situations which led to identically bad decisions undertaken for identically bad reasons’. Is that really what you mean to say?

“See Evan 01.15.18 at 4:02 am 27, nastywoman 01.15.18 at 10:54 am 33”

I did, but when I read #27, I don’t find any expression of incredulity at the idea that Democrats should be held accountable for collaborating with the security state. Similarly, #33 simply points to the flaw in Greenwald’s argument about a particular example he uses to blame the Democrats rather than the Republicans for the failure of a particular bill, in order to show how bad that argument is. You do agree it was a bad example for the argument, right?

Not all problems are Hitler-shaped, so it is often a waste of time to argue whether about similarities between Trump and Hitler.

The worrying features of Trump are the use of an unfocused resentment as a political tool and the lack of agreement about basic facts among the electorate.

@52: I don’t know if you actually read the article to which you linked, but it indicates that Democrats largely oppose the loosening of the rules. The minority of Democrats who have signed on in support of the Senate’s version are mostly (not all) red-state Democrats who are up for re-election this year. They have, however, supported their party on recent big votes. Will matters be improved if those red state Democratic seats go Republican?

You would also read that the House bill, which would “among other things, remove the prohibition against using federally insured funds for risky lending and gut the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.” has no chance in the Senate. Why? Because Democrats won’t support it.

You’ll say that Dodd-Frank itself didn’t go far enough and I’ll agree with you. But right now that big Democratic minority in the Senate is all that’s holding the Republicans back.

@casmilus. My mother was recently rewatching All the President’s Men and commented that the Nixon character sometimes acts in implausible ways, but this isn’t Alan J Pakula’s fault because Nixon really did those things (i.e. The implausible bits are historically true, and are not stuff that was made up for the movie).

The Trump movie will presumably have an even bigger “you couldn’t make this stuff up” problem. What? Your plot premise is that the American people vite for this Trump guy? Come on, noone will believe that. Stephen King’s The Dead Zone had a President that was at least superficially acceptable.

I don’t think so Layman. We’re discussing foreign surveillance here, not domestic. No government required warrants for foreign surveillance. The idea that they would then ignore information obtained on domestic criminals from such overseas surveillance is ludicrous. Also the idea that they should need a warrant to intercept it is weird – if they had reason to know they were going to intercept comms from domestic actors they could simply seek a warrant for more extensive domestic surveillance. This is specifically designed to enable them to act on information obtained from completely normal overseas surveillance.

Note too that most of the objections to this program given above concern its use on Americans not foreigners. The us eof foreign surveillance is not disputed. Now you might have an issue with any surveillance of foreign nationals without a warrant but a) good luck with that and b) I think in the fight against child porn and drug trafficking it’s essential.

So I’ll extend the question to you: if the Australian Federal police identify a local child abuser through overseas surveillance, should they not be allowed to notify police in that person’s home state? And even worse, should Australian Federal police be required to seek a warrant for every act of surveillance of foreign nationals outsidr Australia who are trading pictures of the abuse of Australian children?

– and after watching today – of all people – a so called conservative ”Joe” – coming up with comparing Trump to Hitler in such an… ”old-fashioned conservative way” – that he firstly made sure – that one can’t compare the two – because of the obvious reasons also Mr. Robin mentioned -(the number of people Hitler killed) – and as Trump hasn’t killed anybody – this so called ”conservative” made such a… let me call it ”human” and ”honorable” comparison – between two so terrible disgusting, lying, sick ……. (add anything despicable thing you like) – that I – as probably being just as blond as ”Stormy Daniels how in this world – and on this planet – and in this ”homeland” off mine could have any ”American” – any… anybody – EVER voted for this F…face??!

How was that possible?

I don’t know if you actually read the article to which you linked, but it indicates that Democrats largely oppose the loosening of the rules. The minority of Democrats who have signed on in support of the Senate’s version are mostly (not all) red-state Democrats who are up for re-election this year.

So, let me ask you this: is your theory then that red-state Democrats are voting for this because they think it will help their re-election chances? (What’s Mark Warner’s excuse?) While that might be the case (I cannot read Joe Donnelly’s mind), I have to ask on what grounds you, or they, believe that this will work, especially with this piece of legislation. No one particularly likes banks, not even in the red states, and… Heidi Heitkamp’s theory is that she’s going to help her re-election chances by selling out her constituents? How does that even work? What makes anyone think that anything other than the letter D next to her name is going to matter in the election, or that the average North Dakotan is going to delve deep into the details of a banking regulation bill and sagely come to the conclusion that actually, Heitkamp is good because she voted for this.

Either the “moderate” Dems truly believe this theory, in which case they’re stupid, or they’re just cynically voting to make their constituents’ lives worse. I’m not sure which is worse.

They have, however, supported their party on recent big votes. Will matters be improved if those red state Democratic seats go Republican?

No, of course not. But you actually have to show that any of the above strongly reduces the chances of those seats going to Republicans. I don’t think it does; I don’t think it matters because today nothing other than partisanship and turnout matters. Making concessions to Republicans on the grounds that it might improve your election chances is a fool’s game, it doesn’t work even on its own merits. And the reason why it doesn’t work is contained entirely in your reply: they supported the party on the “big votes,” therefore, they have to go (according to their Republican challengers). That they “crossed the aisle” for something relatively obscure (but, I would still say, big) isn’t going to get them any brownie points. That’s deluded centrist logic.

You would also read that the House bill, which would “among other things, remove the prohibition against using federally insured funds for risky lending and gut the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.” has no chance in the Senate. Why? Because Democrats won’t support it.

So what? They support one bad thing but they won’t support this other, even worse thing? Anyway, all Trump has to do to cripple the CFPB is to put a director in charge who is going to basically shut down all the Bureau’s activities. You know, the way it’s literally happening right now.

You’ll say that Dodd-Frank itself didn’t go far enough and I’ll agree with you. But right now that big Democratic minority in the Senate is all that’s holding the Republicans back.

This is true but also irrelevant. There’s absolutely no reason to collaborate with Republicans on anything. There is literally zero value to be gained from it electorally or from a policy standpoint, but a few Democrats are still going to keep doing it because they have brain parasites.

You’ll have to say more about how Libya is / was like Iraq.

The US turned a functioning state into a disaster zone, many lives were lost and the future of these countries, which aren’t really countries anymore, looks very bleak.

Nobody involved gives a damn about Dem/GOP differences or purported good intentions.

Faustusnotes, “Sebastian_H, I asked for examples of innocent people affected by this warrantless surveillance and you give me two articles about … drug dealers. ”

How do you know they aren’t innocent? You admit that the government is willing to create FALSE methods of ‘discovery’ and create FALSE evidence justifying that ‘discovery’. While you are already authorizing FALSE EVIDENCE creation to nail someone in court why are you so certain that it stops exactly there? How is that all the false evidence creation stops at exactly the point where you’re ok with it? Why aren’t you the slightest bit worried that additional false evidence creation might continue when “they know it is the right guy”? We can’t have the court system investigate this, because we don’t know when it is happening. The reason we don’t when it is happening is because the government is creating FALSE evidentiary trails. So your certainty about their lack of innocence is undermined by your support of systemically frustrating the ability to validate the reality of the evidence.

“If an NSA wiretap of an overseas criminal uncovers an American who is abusing children and selling the film, should the NSA not inform the FBI or local police?”

Sure they should. And when the case comes forward the FBI should say “we got this from a legal NSA wiretap”. And then we can investigate whether or not it was actually a legal NSA wiretap. We already know the NSA wiretaps all sorts of foreign nationals so that isn’t a secret. If it is of national security interest that some PARTICULAR foreign national is wiretapped such that it would be a threat to national security, you wait until it isn’t a threat to national security. What you don’t do is create FALSE EVIDENCE and submit that to the court. Choose one or the other.

And that is all assuming that the NSA isn’t tapping domestic wires and just lying to us about it. They absolutely did that with emails before the Snowden revelations so it isn’t exactly above them to lie about that either.

“You think there is parallel construction because you think that obstetricians and gynaecologists are deliberately killing viable late term foetuses without reason, on the whim of the mother, and making up a reason (which btw doesn’t make sense since you also admit that they don’t have to report any evidence of non-viability, so why would they bother making up information?). This is a disgusting thing to believe with no basis in fact, and you should be ashamed of yourself for believing it.”

This is a pre-Gosnell argument. You don’t get to pretend there is no basis in fact anymore. The investigations into Gosnell showed that more than a hundred viable fetuses were aborted by him. He didn’t kidnap a hundred women with viable fetuses and abort the fetuses against their will. You can’t use the argument that “no gynecologist would do such an abortion” because he did, and you can’t use the argument that “it is very unlikely that a woman would seek such an abortion” because at least a hundred did in a couple of years in a minor state.

Colin Street, you of all people complaining about threadjacking is a bit rich don’t you think? If you don’t like the analogy, fine. It is an equally valid instance of the law deliberately being crafted in such a way as to avoid oversight for publically agreed policy goals and to obscure violations. If you don’t want to argue the particulars of the analogous situation, feel free not to do so.

I thought the main reason for moderation was the view that certain women were getting attacked in the threads, but I don’t remember clearly enough to be sure.

“…and why it’s bad than about Trump’s criminality and the structural problems in the US constitution” The main point we are talking about here [the government creating false evidence to obscure questionably legal wiretapping] isn’t Trumps’ criminality. Its is Bush II and Obama’s criminality too. Just to be clear.

They could also not want to piss off large donors right before a tough election.

But there’s another structural reason for these kinds of votes.

The internal model of the Democratic Party which makes the most sense is: a top-heavy national apparatus that is a mix of neoliberal ideologues (“brain-dead parasites”) and grifters (Mook, Shrum etc.) riding herd on more-or-less progressive activists that are siloed within states.

The ideologues / grifters provide political relationships, money, media expertise and competent political staff; activists provide bodies

State-level fights between these two are *vicious*

The activists have enough power to occasionally shake things up (Sanders, Lemont) but they have their own grifters (Levine) and lack infrastructure that carries over between elections

Some senior politicians (Warren, Gilibrand) are trying to create an alternative national power base outside of the grifter parasites. They will fail. They need to build institutions, which need careerists, who even if they believe in changing the party are also concerned about their own security. Everyone sells out if the price is right, and the pocketbooks of the grifter parasites are functionally bottomless.

Hence the surveillance vote. Another word for “Senator” is “an office filled with people who will have their future prospects crater if the grifter parasite faction shuts them out”.

Sebastian H

This is a pre-Gosnell argument. You don’t get to pretend there is no basis in fact anymore. The investigations into Gosnell showed that more than a hundred viable fetuses were aborted by him. He didn’t kidnap a hundred women with viable fetuses and abort the fetuses against their will. You can’t use the argument that “no gynecologist would do such an abortion” because he did, and you can’t use the argument that “it is very unlikely that a woman would seek such an abortion” because at least a hundred did in a couple of years in a minor state.

If somebody who is pregnant wants to terminate that pregnancy, it should not be a crime to do so.

Layman we are discussing foreign surveillance because that’s what the Greenwald article and the vote was about. We aren’t discussing domestic surveillance because that’s not what Robin is talking about. I don’t think the Australian security agencies require warrants to surveil overseas parties, so I’m not sure your response makes sense. But if they do it still leaves us in the same pickle: if they discover communication between the foreign party and an Australian national should they not be allowed to inform local police to act on it? If they do then they have by definition surveilled the local without a warrant. If they don’t they have allowed a crime to continue.

Sebastian, is your argument about parallel construction that the warrantless surveillance of domestic persons’ overseas contacts would be acceptable if it were admitted in court? Because I think that a) your real objection is to the surveillance itself not the way it is presented to courts and b) it’s a very convenient way for you to avoid showing me any actual victims of FISA. For example I am not interested in parallel construction if the people being parallel constructed into court were raided and discovered to have kiddy porn on their computers. In that case the foreign surveillance worked. I was hoping you would show me examples of people who have been charged on completely weak evidence from a foreign wiretap, or people whose political activities have landed them in hot water through surveillance. You know, the chilling effect of the surveillance state. Instead you are showing me some murky law enforcement techniques. Heads up: American cops kill a lot of people and steal innocent people’s money. Murky law enforcement is a perfectly normal domestic issue in the USA and not a special consequence of FISA. See also: planting evidence. I am trying to find out if FISA actually contributes to the chilling effect of the surveillance state – why surveillance of foreign nationals without a warrant is bad – not see more evidence of why us domestic police are shonky. If they really want to get person X they can just kill him. Why is FISA the issue here?

I absolutely can make the argument about abortion doctors because Gosnell was not a doctor. He was not registered to practice and he was a vicious criminal. On the basis of the actions of a vicious criminal not registered to practice, who broke every rule of modern medical ethics, you are pretending that non criminal registered doctors, properly regulated by their professional and medical authorities, routinely break the law to murder viable late term fetuses on the mother’s whim and then lie about it. As I said, that’s a disgusting thing to claim and you should be ashamed of yourself.

Faustusnotes@78:

In addition to what Layman ably points out above, there’s another huge problem with your argument here. The premise you’re advancing is that sigint gathered on foreign nationals is gathered actively; it’s like you’re arguing for agents sitting in a dark room listening to a live feed of bad guy’s phones. That cartoonish caricature is the only interpretation that makes sense with everything you’ve argued, anyway, unless you truly have no idea how parallel construction was used in practice. It was not perforce agents working on foreign intelligence or law enforcement matters discovering crimes while they were actively monitoring the sigint. Suggesting that is… naive at best. The US intelligence apparatuses collect more raw intelligence than they can thoroughly process. Info sharing with domestic agencies included letting domestics go keyword-fishing in archived intelligence for persons of interest that they had no warrant to wiretap, and then if they found something interesting, engaging in parallel construction to superficially decontaminate the fruits of the poisonous tree.

Parallel construction is not a matter of foreign LEOs seeing some crime and passing along a tip. It is as much a matter of domestic LEOs scouring inadmissible foreign surveillance data to detect objectionable activity on US citizens, and then illegally concealing their constitutional violations from both oversight bodies and the courts. Your objection that it is only harming criminals might be arguable (though still glaringly unconstitutional) if it were strictly using processed intel that had been forwarded to domestic agencies upon discovery of wrongdoing by humans in the loop. That is not, however, how it was historically used; domestic agencies would be the processing agents who discovered it, retained it, decided to act on it, and then concealed its provenance. Given this, Layman is quite right to suggest that it follows from your logic that all warrants could be done away, so long as the LEOs promise to only target bad hombres…

And there is literally less than zero value to be gained from it electorally or from a policy standpoint, that ”a few” Democrats have brain parasites.

Especially if such a lot of Democrats don’t.

I’m sure my comments on Crooked Timber, a blog that is notably read by voters nationwide, will totally have a negative effect on the electoral chances of Democrats. If “a lot” of Democrats do the right thing, well, that’s great and good; I’m talking about the ones who do not, and who form a substantial faction within the party and particularly within the party leadership.

You should communicate that insight to McCaskill, Tester, Manchin, et al. I’m sure they have no idea what’s going on in their home states or which vote is or isn’t likely to hurt them in November.

Tragically, none of the above have solicited my opinions.

Heitkamp is probably the most vulnerable of the red state Democrats. She comes from one of the whitest states in the Union, where Trump won by 36 points (and it’s not a very diverse set of white folks – mostly old, rural, evangelical). She won her seat narrowly by localizing the race and distancing herself from the national Democratic Party. She can’t be seen as unwilling to work with Republicans.

Yes, she is, and it is, and she did. But you still haven’t explained how supporting Republican legislation to damage her own constituents is supposed to get her re-elected. Just saying “I worked with Republicans on a bank bill” is going to draw a bunch of blank stares; no one is going to care about this at all. The Republican playbook, as performed by, most recently, the Gillespie campaign in Virginia, is to make everything about racial and cultural anxiety. Voting for this garbage isn’t going to help her or Manchin or Tester fight that battle. I don’t have any problem with her “localizing” the race, but it should be done in such a way that offers her constituents tangible benefits, instead of selling them down the river for the thinnest veneer of “bipartisanship,” which no one will pay attention to.

When Trump leaves office, a Democratic president can fill positions at the CFBP with someone who will actually do the job. In the meantime, if Democrats do well in 2018 and are able to maintain or increase levels of resistance, the powers of the agency (which aren’t powerful enough IMO) will be preserved even if the Trumpistas refuse to use them for their intended purpose.

What federal agencies do actually matters, a lot. Putting Scott Pruitt in charge at the EPA, for example, is going to damage the agency in many ways that are going to be hard to recover from. Incidentally, which Democrats voted to confirm him? Why, it’s none other than our brave heroes Manchin and Heitkamp; I’m sure Joe is going to endlessly tout his vote for the guy who wants to allow fracking companies to poison West Virginia water, right? That’s totally going to bail him out against whichever deranged mouth-foamer will spend the campaign howling about how Joe Manchin personally brought MS-13 to America to abort non-gay babies.

Agencies can be damaged a lot because when the people who lead them are opposed to the agency’s mission, the rank and file quit. Infrastructure degrades, institutional expertise is lost, caseloads grow without resolution, etc. Cleaning up that mess is never as easy as simply putting a good person in charge, because destruction is easier than creation. Heitkamp and Manchin literally voted to ruin their constituents’ lives for a pathetic line that will probably get two uses before November. Great politics, everyone!

Faustusnotes

Sebastian, is your argument about parallel construction that the warrantless surveillance of domestic persons’ overseas contacts would be acceptable if it were admitted in court? Because I think that a) your real objection is to the surveillance itself not the way it is presented to courts and b) it’s a very convenient way for you to avoid showing me any actual victims of FISA.

In the Reuters article that Sebastian H linked to, several people are quoted directly in ways which suggest very strongly that their primary objection is not to law enforcement officers using this material but rather to the fact that law enforcements officers are lying about what they are doing, repeatedly, in court cases, to both the defence and the prosecution. Now, it is possible, as you seem to be suggesting, that this is not really the primary objection for Sebastian H; and, taking your suggestion further, possibly this is also true of all the people quoted in the Reuters article. However, if it is in itself a valid and weighty objection, it doesn’t become any less valid or less weighty even if it is true that some people are using it as a cloak for their real objections. Do you think it is a bad thing if law enforcement officers get into the habit of lying to the courts? I do. I think it’s a bad thing if law enforcement officers get into the habit of lying to the courts, even if they do so in pursuit of convictions of the genuinely guilty. If you think it’s an acceptable price to pay, in order to get guilty people convicted, for law enforcement officers to get into the habit (not just in a rare egregious case but repeatedly, with standing advice for how to do it) of lying to the courts, then I’d like you to explain your case in favour of that conclusion, because I can’t figure it out.

You also wrote this:

Layman the domestic police will still have to follow due process in pursuing the investigation. The same thing applies to domestic surveillance, surely? The police get a warrant to surveil person X and discover person Y is preparing to commit a crime. What should they do? I think they should act. You, presumably, don’t. Why?

I don’t know the thoughts of Layman as an individual, but I do know that thinking that the police should act in a case such as this is fully compatible with thinking that they should not deceive the courts about what they have done.

– or we could make the government shutdown about ”surveillance” too – as if the U.S. surveillance apparatus would have leaked some pictures of Trumps Golden Shower instead of the Russian Surveillers holding them back – would that have stopped comparisons between Hitler and Trump – as Hitler probably never did such… stuff -(and he loved his ”dogs” too) – and in conclusion would that have stopped enough of our fellow Americans NOT to vote for a… a… Von Clownstick – who doesn’t respect the most basic civilized American… ”rules” for cleanliness?!

Layman I’m not dodging then, I think the case is that I genuinely don’t understand them. Putting aside parallel construction, I want to know how an innocent person can be affected by these laws. I want to know how a warrantless foreign search would lead to a warrantless domestic intervention. If a doemstic agent does a search of this database of foreign contacts and then asks for a warrant based on the info obtained and tells the judge that the foreign search is the reason for the domestic warrant application, what has been done wrong? The domestic judge approves the warrant on the basis of the law, surely? If the Constitution doesn’t say it’s wrong to do warrantless overseas searches then this is not unconstitutional, surely? One argument above seems to be that this is bad because it’s a keyword search but how can it be unconstitutional? The people who wrote the Constitution didn’t know about the existence of keyword searches. Of there is a database of constitutionally obtained information and a police officer does a keyword search for child porn and finds some evidence how is this unconstitutional? Should police be barred from entering any legally obtained information into a database because then they could do a keyword search? What exactly is the underlying principle behind not making the prosecutor’s job easier, as mentioned above? Should they also be required to stand at their desk? Is the principle that the rapist should get a head start? I completely understand if you think overseas targets should also require a warrant – that’s very solid . But he explicit position of Greenwald is that overseas warrantless searches are okay but using info on domestic targets obtained from those searches is not. I want to understand how that makes any sense and how it hurts innocent people domestically. Instead I’m offered that it makes it easier to catch criminals and this is a bad thing (we don’t want to make the prosecutor’s job easier). I think three unrelated issues are being conflated and one of these appears to be that information obtained overseas pointing to domestic crimes simply should not be used.

– and sometimes I think this whole ”Comparison Lunacy” had not really started when some Americans had compared Bush to Hitler – as it seems to be this American… ”custom”? to compare anything to Hitler – and one of the best responses to this lunacy has to be given -(again!) to another famous American Philosopher with the name of Seinfeld who invented the Soup Nazi – NO! – the real ”Comparison Lunacy” probably started when Americans compared Obama to Bush and tried to tell the world ”they are just the same” – BE-cause there were ”some”… let’s call them ”traditional American policies” – a truly ”patriotic American” like Obama just couldn’t… let’s say – ”ignore”? without risking even more to be called… ”a Fascist” – by Americans who confused ”Nationalsozialisten” with some ”Left Wing Sozialisten” or Crazy ”Libertarians” with something which could be considered to be to ”the left” – just because some Crazy US ”Libertarians” shared the same aversion against any type of surveillance as some to ”the Left”.

And now a F…face – who got labeled by some ”truly conservative” to be ”a Democrat” – and ran for a party which calls itself ”Republican” or ”conservative” is the new ”Not Hitler” of our ”Homeland”?

Armes Heimatland!!

Layman @89

Invective aside, what does that even mean? “We no choice but to pursue regime change?” It was a “tragedy” , “mistakes were made”, “we had no idea…”, “it’s their own fault”, “there’s only so much we can do”, “oopsy daisy, but hey we meant well” ?

Please spell it out.

Faustusnotes@102:

If a doemstic agent does a search of this database of foreign contacts and then asks for a warrant based on the info obtained and tells the judge that the foreign search is the reason for the domestic warrant application, what has been done wrong?

The judge would not approve the warrant because of the exclusionary rule. Which is why your fantasy scenario in which the LEO is honest with the courts about accessing inadmissable foreign surveillance for domestic law enforcement never happens, and why parallel construction came to be.

But he explicit position of Greenwald is that overseas warrantless searches are okay but using info on domestic targets obtained from those searches is not.

[…]

I think three unrelated issues are being conflated and one of these appears to be that information obtained overseas pointing to domestic crimes simply should not be used.

You’re again conflating targeted foreign wiretaps with large-scale foreign sigint communication interception. Further, you’re once again trying to sneak an implied notion that the incriminating information has been found before the LEOs enter the picture, when in fact the information would never be seen if the LEOs were not scouring information that they are not permitted to obtain, nor can they use in court. If we actually want LEOs to be doing this, we should have laws in place (to likely include a Constitutional amendment weakening the 4th) to actually allow them to directly monitor communication between US citizens and foreign nationals outside the US w/o warrants, because rule of law is important and because per your other reasoning, catching bad hombres is important so we should be actively seeking them all out rather than merely sweeping up some accidentally. Yet this is not your position. Why not? And since your continual defense is that we can trust nothing nefarious or abusive is done with foreign warrantlessly obtained surveillance data, why shouldn’t we be allowing domestic wiretapping without warrants so long as the LEOs then parallelly construct a superficially untainted source of the illicitly obtained evidence?

What exactly is the underlying principle behind not making the prosecutor’s job easier, as mentioned above?

Maintaining the 4th Amendment as something other than a dead letter. The exclusionary rule exists for precisely this reason; the bad hombres’ rights must be protected so that you still have your rights. Or if that’s too narrow for you, rule of law.

Putting aside parallel construction, I want to know how an innocent person can be affected by these laws.

This is very much the wrong question, and if you need me to point that out to you then… this is a problem, and it’s your problem, and it’s a big problem.

It’s not a matter of guilt or innocence in isolation. It’s discriminatory effect, and to detect that you need to compare how often “guilt” turns into “conviction” for the two populations, “spied-on” and “non-spied-on”, which means that to understand the situation you can’t just look at “spied-on people convicted”, but also “non-spied-on people convicted”; if population A has resources thrown at them so that 100% of the crimes committed by people in that population are detected, and population B only has 50% of the crimes detected… that’s a problem.

[but seriously this should not be something a person should have to point out to you; it’s the same damned problem as “higher police resources devoted to policing black populations leading to higher black conviction rates”, which is an argument that any semi-credible commentator on US law enforcement should very much already be familiar with.]

novakant: “Invective aside, what does that even mean?”

I thought it was pretty clear. If you describe Libya as a ‘functioning state’ in March of 2011, you’re ignorant of the facts. If you think it was the Americans who decided to change the regime, you’re ignorant of the facts. Go read about them, then we can talk. Until you do, it’s a waste of time.

Sebastian H

What happened is that at least a hundred women paid Gosnell to abort fully viable fetuses without a medical necessity to their own health in Pennsylvania.

I surmise from context that this is a crime under Pennsylvania law, although I haven’t actually checked. In any case, if it is a crime, in Pennsylvania or anywhere else, it shouldn’t be. If people who are pregnant want to have their own pregnancies terminated, it should not be a crime. You use the expression ‘vicious criminality’; it may be a crime, if that’s what the law says, but there’s nothing vicious about it.

Good now we’re getting somewhere. Someone up above have the example of a BLM activist caught up in these laws. Now, has this happened? THIS is what I’m getting at.

I’m asking these questions because we have two very good previous examples of civil libertarians getting upset about new tech – DNA testing and CCTV- which have proven to be invaluable in protecting the rights of the innocent. So I’m not inclined to agree that this form of surveillance is not ultimately beneficial without good evidenced catching international criminal groups is difficult and important work that requires cooperation between local, national and international agencies. If we can balance this task with the rights of citizens then we’re on good ground.

I should also point out that other examples above (person wxzy found guilty by planting evidence) assume police malfeasance far worse than parallel construction. If you can’t trust your police not to convict innocent people by evidence planting you have bigger problems than FISA laws. Don’t conflated the fact that your police are Nazi thugs with the specific impact of a specific law. And remember your interlocutor may come from a country where police are not Nazi thugs.

“I’m asking these questions because we have two very good previous examples of civil libertarians getting upset about new tech – DNA testing and CCTV- which have proven to be invaluable in protecting the rights of the innocent…”

I want to react vehemently to this comment but I must be misunderstanding you. Are you positing a situation where the NSA is monitoring someone and says “hey you’ve arrested the wrong guy, you should let him go…”. Because if you’ve heard of that, I’m going to be rather surprised.

And you may be misunderstanding libertarian objections. I’ve literally never heard libertarians getting upset over DNA testing by defendants trying to prove their innocence. The upset I hear is over dragnet DNA testing without reasonable suspicion tying it to a particular crime, or DNA testing of all arrestees just because the government has you in their clutches.

Faustusnotes: the nature of “a problem” is not limited to things that you think are problems

Rejecting out-of-hand evidence that doesn’t point to anything you currently regard as “a problem” is essentially acting with complete and unwarranted confidence in your undrstanding.

Like I’ve said before, a person’s conceptual errors are invisible to them.

(Not that you’re guaranteed to be wrong, here… but the fact that you’re refusing to even look, and have presumably been doing so for years, means that the possibility that there’s no substantial errors buried in your thinking is basically zero. And these are problems that introspection can’t lead you out of, only into.)

I think Faustus is coming at this from a different background to US commenters. The US, legistically oriented, emphasizing process, with fragmented law enforcement, necessarily has difficulty with these issues. The distinction between surveillance and search, for instance, has had oceans of ink spilled on it in the US (can the police watch you? enter your property? take notice of what is visible on your property? respond to signs of an offence? If so, what signs and how far? And so on). This is very ill-suited to intercepting and reading communications over a packet-switched network, and communicating potential evidence to law enforcement. Even the boundary between domestic and foreign is hard to define, given that a phone call from Boston to Chicago can be routed via Toronto or a satellite over the mid-Atlantic.

In short, the problems lie not in the details but in the system.

Faustusnotes: “Layman, I think police should have warrants for surveillance.“

Why? You said or implied (in 69) that you were unconcerned that some people were being / might be prosecuted as a result of having been identified as criminals by surveillance for which no domestic warrant was obtained, and you asked how innocent people might be harmed by this. The clear implication is that 1) you don’t think surveillance is harmful to innocent people, and 2) you approve of catching criminals even when by unwarranted surveillance. If I understand your view correctly, why should warrants be required? Innocent people have nothing to fear from them, and catching criminals with unwarranted surveillance is good. Isn’t that what you’re saying?

Layman @112

Libya was a functioning state (and doing comparatively well within the region), there was some unrest which turned into a crisis, the UN decided to impose a no-fly zone ostensibly to protect civilians, the US (mainly at the urging of Clinton) perverted this mandate to pursue regime change and once this was achieved was unable to put the genies it had released back into the bottle and Lybia is now a failed state.

The parallels to Iraq are clear (unsurprisingly there are also differences).

This is getting rather tiresome, so over and out.

Faustusnotes

I’m asking for reasons why hear restrictions are needed and I’m getting “the police might plant evidence” or ” the constitution”. In the former case why have police at all?

Well, how do you answer this question? I can think of three possibilities.
A. You actually don’t think we should have police at all. That seems to be a poor fit with your comments, so probably that’s not it.
B. You are of the view that police never plant evidence. That seems a very strong conclusion that you’d have a hard time justifying.
C. You acknowledge that police might sometimes plant evidence but think that this consideration is outweighed by the benefits of having police. If so, you already have your own answer to the question you’ve posed, so it’s not clear why you’re posing it.

Colin street, I’m sorry but when I see your name in a long backlist of comments I skip your comment because I find your penchant for accusing anyone who disagrees with you of having a mental problem to be tiresome and nasty. So the answer is “I didn’t read your comment” and I can’t be bothered going back to find it, especially if it means I might stumble on you calling me autistic or whatever your shtick is.

J-D you have two comments and I’ll reply to both of them. First you say you are unaware of the role of DNA evidence in protecting against inequality. Are you not aware of the wave of death row inmates being exonerated by DNA evidence? Back in the 1990s when DNA was new everyone worried about state intrusiveness and new forms of evidence abuse but in the end the technology really helped poor black inmates in the USA. As for cctv – I know there’s a civil liberties case that there’s something wrong with having cameras in public places but if like me you have lived in a high crime area (London, in my case) you’ll be aware of how valuable they are for self protection. People behave differently when they know they’re being filmed. Remember the newspaper seller who was murdered by a policeman during the g20 demonstrations in London? It wasn’t cctv but it was film that got that guy caught. I have yet to see a case against CCTV that outweighs its benefits for preventing rape and murder, and for catching rapists and murderers.

As for my question “why have police at all?” I was being facetious. The point is that the concerns presented here so far are actually concerns about domestic police practice, not concerns about the use of the intercepts.

Consider for example an Australian intelligence officer who performs surveillance – with a warrant – of an overseas criminal, Crim X, and finds that an Aussie, person Y, has been in regular contact with Crim X to sell Crim X video of children being abused in Australia. The obvious question is, can the officer refer the case of Crim X to state police who can then seek – urgently – a warrant to arrest person Y and search his computer? Or should the intelligence officer, upon finding the existence of this communication – not its content! – have to apply to a judge for a warrant to read it? If so, the judge is presented with only “person Y contacted crim X” and will reject the application, surely. Is this your preference?

If so, how do you think a major child porn investigation like this would proceed? The fact is that police need these kinds of powers in order to do their job and in time-sensitive cases (like this porn website) they can’t always be getting a warrant for every communication, and I think this example makes this point very well.

Sebastian_H, I am completely uninterested in what “libertarians” think of these laws. Libertarians think a company should be able to sack its staff based on their facebook feed. I am interested in what civil libertarians think.

Now I asked for an innocent victim of these laws, and then someone raised the example of a BLM activist being imprisoned on hearsay. When pushed they said we can’t know anything about whether this has happened because of the magical obscuring powers of parallel construction. But we must know if there is a BLM activist out there who has been charged and imprisoned without cause? Or an animal rights activist, or … Now I know there have been some insane charges laid in recent US history but they have been things like breach of the peace for laughing at a senator – there is no secret about how the evidence got there. So are there any examples of this happening? Because if you don’t know of any activists who have been imprisoned on the basis of dodgy info that the police surely couldn’t have got, or just general harassment unrelated to any activism, that could be inferred as due to this FISA shit, then we might know of it, right? Otherwise all I see is “it’s happening but you just have to believe me on this.”

So, where is the evidence?

Faustusnotes, if a number of people are telling you that your argument is incoherent, you should consider the possibility that your argument is incoherent. I followed the link you provided, read the story, and I can’t find any indication in that story that foreign surveillance powers even played a role. Certainly I don’t see any indication of urgency which would have made it unreasonable for anyone to get a conventional warrant – the site in question was actually being operated by the police as a sting operation – and for all I know from the story, conventional warrants were obtained.

Also, too, one more time: Is it your view that innocent people are not harmed by warrantless surveillance and/or searches? If so, why do you believe warrants should be required at all?

Peter T:

“Actually, the Australian intelligence officer cited by faustus would not require a warrant to intercept foreign communications…”

Yes, I know.

“Should they see involvement of an Australian national, they can notify the Australian Federal Police, who can then request the intelligence, suitably sanitised, as a basis for further investigation.”

Yes, I know.

“If the investigation turns up enough to apply for a warrant, this is done.”

Yes, I know. But thanks for clearing that up.

96: What federal agencies do actually matters, a lot.

Who argues otherwise? Not me. Nor did I say that it would be easy to undo the damage currently being wrought by Trump. To repeat my point – fighting to preserve the powers of the agency is a meaningful fight. The red state Democrats are going to cast votes I don’t agree with. Some of those votes are defensible and some are not, but the those votes are the price you pay for having someone with D behind his or her name holding on to that seat. Look at your own list: Heitkamp and Manchin were the only Dems who voted for Pruitt (who was going to be confirmed anyway no matter how they voted). Other red state Dems voted against. The single Republican to vote against Pruitt, with his appalling record, was Susan Collins.

Jerry, what is your suggested alternative method for catching rapists and child abusers? Mob justice?

Faustusnotes@137:
You are yet again attempting to conflate domestic LEOs going fishing in uncurated mass data interception explicitly for intelligence purposes where one party was a foreign national, with a very sanitized story of the passing along information understood to be evidence of crimes discovered by concerned humans in the loop. This is tedious.

I’ll add, for clarity, that there are many areas of police malfeasance or legal loopholes whose impact is clear and easy to find evidence for. For example:

– poor dna handling techniques and cross-contamination lead to false convictions: we can easily find examples, and discuss the implications
– undercover police acting as agents provocateurs leading to activists being convicted for crimes they didn’t commit: we can find lots of examples of this in the UK
– lack of body cameras pro police laws enabling extra judicial killing: plenty of examples of this in the USA
– SWATting leading to the death of innocent people and being used as an instrument of harassment by far right groups against feminists: we can find examples of this and discuss the specific people targeted and how it affected them.

We can find evidence of these things, present examples of the people affected, discuss how the law or practice was used to damage the affected people. But 150 comments in here and no one can do the same for the FISA rules. If you can’t show me how innocent people are affected or how it is creating a chilling environment for activism then maybe, just maybe, this is because it isn’t.

Faustusnotes

… police need to be restrained or they inevitably abuse their powers.

If police are restrained, they will still inevitably abuse their powers. The issue is of degree, and of balance. You have to operate on the expectation that powers granted to police–or to anybody else, for that matter–will be both used for their proper purposes and abused. If the powers are enlarged, or restrictions on them reduced, both the scope for proper use and the scope for abuse will be enlarged. If restrictions are tightened, or powers reduced, both scope for proper use and scope for abuse will be reduced. The object should be to tailor the powers, and the restrctions on them, so as to best balance the two, paying the lowest price in abuse for the best value in proper use. Now, how that should ideally be done if designing a system from scratch, I have no idea. But we’re not in the position of starting from scratch, and we’re never going to be. If you want to persuade me that a particular existing restriction should be relaxed, you’re going to have to do one of two things: show me that the general balance has been tipped too far against police power, so that some general loosening of restrictions is probably a good idea; or show me that you have an idea for a better kind of restraint or regulation to replace the one under discussion. So far you haven’t done either of those, so I’m still thinking: ‘Well, I don’t know, but the chances are there is some good reason for this rule, so it’s probably best to keep it until we have a better idea.’

Faustusnotes: “If you can’t show me how innocent people are affected or how it is creating a chilling environment for activism then maybe, just maybe, this is because it isn’t.”

And now you’re back to the implicit claim that warrantless surveillance doesn’t harm the innocent. So, again, why should warrants ever be required for surveillance. You seem to be saying that we _know_ police break the rules when it comes to conventional wiretaps, but we shouldn’t expect that they will do the same with the fruits of secret surveillance, and we can’t let that expectation inform our views about the secret surveillance. Really? Incoherent, right?

So Layman, were back to your a): it is impossible for officers to run the kind of sting I linked to above because they must be 100% restrained at all times. Even though you have no evidence that the current lack of restraint has harmed anyone.

Regarding the apparent contradiction of my accepting warrants for some things but not others: don’t be so petty. In the case in describing the police still need to get two warrants: one to digitally surveil crim X and another to physically search person Y. They cannot harass person Y through surveillance alone. They did not, for example, decide on a whim to start reading person Y’s love letters. They accidentally found a small number of letters from person Y to crim X and read only them.

Consider an older example.ple: police get permission to open and secretly read crim X’s mail. How are they going to do this if they cannot read any communication from anyone who is not crim X? How does surveillance of communication even work if you can’t read the letters you have opened? You’re suggesting they can open all crim. x’s foreign letters but not his local ones. But if crim X is importing drugs into America the entire point is to open his local letters. Do you not understand how stupid your restrictions are? And worse still, if they do open a letter from person Y that says “I am holding a captive at secret location Z” they can’t go rescue that person because the constitution says no? This is just stupid.

Jerry I have specified repeatedly the eicdence I want is not concealed: I want to know of any BLM / Dakota etc activist who has been charged or imprisoned on trumped up charges that were not directly related to the demonstrations themselves. If you can’t even produce that then it must be the case that the FISA laws have never been used in the way you intended. Your current argument is that a) it’s happening a lot b) it’s magically hidden by magic so there is no evidence of any kind and C) I can’t identify even a single likely or possible victim.

That’s not an argument, it’s magical Thinking.

*is unexploited

An obvious possible use of this as a form of harassment is against eg a member of CAIR or erhas an international human rights activist, who might have contact with potential dubious overseas people. But no-one has presented such an example and I know of no-one from CAIR or eg human rights watch who has been imprisoned for eg assisting terrorism (which seems like a possible form of harassment that could derive from these laws) . Presumably if you know these laws are so bad you can think of or find such an example? Because 150 comments in you’ve shown me none.

Faustusnotes, I’ve concluded that you’re ignorant of the difference in the evidenciary standards or requirements for FISA warrants vs. conventional ones, and of how those differences create opportunity for abuse by law enforcement; and further, that you think innocent people aren’t harmed when the police violate their rights. I can’t really understand why you don’t state the obvious – that you therefore have no grounds for objecting to any warrantless surveillance at all – but I’m no longer interested in the answer to that question. Indeed, I never was, I only offered it as a means to get you to examine the flaw in your stated views, but it seems that was a waste of time.

Jerry 82: “I have to ask on what grounds you, or they, believe that this will work, especially with this piece of legislation. No one particularly likes banks, not even in the red states, and… Heidi Heitkamp’s theory is that she’s going to help her re-election chances by selling out her constituents?”

Maybe you need a reminder that Trump explicitly campaigned on ending banking regulation. i looked it up: “Under Dodd-Frank, the regulators are running the banks. The bankers are petrified of the regulators. And the problem is that the banks aren’t loaning money to people who will create jobs” It may seem incredible to you but the fact is that enough voters actually believe this nonsense. Heitkamp’s constituents voted for Trump, they voted for the promise to repeal Dodd-Frank. Might that help explain (not excuse but explain) her “sellout”? Following up on my comment above, the blind spot in many left analyses is the voter. They just can’t imagine that voters really support terrible policies that hurt them personally.

One side trumps up intelligence to build a fraudulent case to invade Iraq, and the other doesn’t.

Indeed, one side only provided 89 votes in the House and 29 in the Senate for that fraudulent case.

One side seeks relentlessly to disenfranchise voters, and the other doesn’t.

Democrats have made legitimate progress as a party on this issue and where they have done so, they deserve credit (c.f. McAuliffe’s restoration of voting rights to convicted felons in Virginia). However, it sill remains a minority (no pun intended) position within the upper echelons of the party.

One side is committed to destroying the social welfare state, and the other isn’t.

This is just completely untrue; you’re asking people to pretend that the Clinton welfare reforms never happened and that many of the same people who designed those policies aren’t still in positions of power within the party. It’s true that the Democratic approach is overall less monstrous than the Republican one, but it’s still a Byzantine tangle of means-tested programs that waste money trying to ensure that someone somewhere doesn’t get a penny that they don’t deserve instead of just being universal benefits.

One side bends the rules in the Senate to get what they want, or prevent what they don’t want, and the other doesn’t.

There is no such thing as “bending rules.” There is power, and you either exercise it for the benefit of your constituents, or you cede the opportunity to your enemies. Republicans understand this; Democrats do not. All these appeals to “norms” and “rules” are meaningless posturing.

One side runs on an openly racist platform, and the other doesn’t.

Yes, let’s pat ourselves on the back for not being the party of white nationalism. A low bar to clear, but I’m glad we’ve done it. It would be also cool if the Obama administration hadn’t engineered the largest deportation of undocumented immigrants in US history, but I guess that’s too much to ask for.

So we have the claim (by Z on this thread) that democracy is a sham (which is partially true) and the claim that Democrats are traitors for supporting bad things like NSA surveillance but what do you do with the inconvenient fact that voters often want those bad things and would punish Democratic politicians if they didn’t support them?

Says who? If political science has taught us anything over the decades, it’s that most voters don’t really have a coherent notion of government policies anyway; hell, a good chunk of them don’t know which party controls the government. Anyway, if this were true (i.e. that Democrats support NSA surveillance because they believe it’s popular with voters), it would predict that Democrats should also support things like large increases in the marginal tax rate and Medicare for all, as well as a host of other generally progressive positions that polling has shown to be quite popular; while some Democrats do support this and that’s great, a large number of them do not. Among those who don’t is a large fraction of the leadership including the last Democratic Speaker of the House.

In reality, of course, Democrats support NSA surveillance not because they think voters will punish them if they don’t (it’s laughable to pretend that Nancy Pelosi or Diane Feinstein fear challenges from the right) but because they genuinely believe those things are good. Adam Schiff fucking loves the NSA and would marry it if it were legal. A large number of Democratic politicians simply do not care about these issues at all; they just care about having the “right” people in charge, which means pleasant-faced technocrats in pressed suits and not buffoonish vulgarians like Trump and the various grifters that surround him.

It should be understood that when I talk about “Democrats,” I’m really talking about the leadership class, represented, mostly, by elected officials but also by various non-elected individuals in positions of power within the party structure. I’m not talking about the voters, who, as a whole, are a lot more progressive than their representatives would lead you to believe. There’s nothing wrong with being a registered Democrat; I’m one myself. But I don’t live under the delusion that the people being elected under that label are progressive saviors. At their median, they represent a temporary bulwark against the erosion of both (some) civil liberties and the welfare state, but I’m not going to sit here and heap praise on them for meeting some minimal standard of human decency. Democrats who collaborate with the GOP should be made to fear the left, especially in blue states.

“But I don’t live under the delusion that the people being elected under that label are progressive saviors.”

I kinda like you, Jerry, but this bit is nonsense on steroids, because neither do the people you’re shouting at live under the delusion that the people elected as Democrats are progressive saviors. At least none of them here seem to, least of all me. You’re responding to comments I made when I was explicitly making that point, after all.

So Layman and Jerry, no evidence?

Let me give you another example. Today the guardian reports a group of activists who help migrants in the desert in Arizona have been charged with various crimes. Here’s your chance. We’re they charged on the basis of being seen doing the things they are charged with, or do ICE have dubious intercepts?! You could make the case that maybe it’s the latter, then go investigate – do the activists in question know they were seen leaving water, or must it be some non physical evidence that has them in trouble? Parallel construction doesn’t stop you looking at a case and saying “the police could not have done this without help.” But eg the occupy activists were arrested in their physical camps on the basis of something connected with the occupation itslef, so it’s obvious to anyone who cares to look that it wasn’t an intercept that got them in trouble.

Either you don’t have evidence or you’re too lazy to look for likely cases. So instead you claim that evidence is impossible to find and ask me to trust you. Other examples of this logic: global warming is a hoax based on fabricated data, you can tell how big the conspiracy is by how well it’s hidden; the moon landing is fake and NASA must be super powerful to have hidden it so well; 9/11 was an inside job and we should be really scared because those dudes can kill 2500 people and completely cover their trail!

This is how you are thinking, Jerry. Even the lies that got us into Iraq were transparently obvious from the moment they were uttered, but you want me to believe your perfect conspiracy.

So again. Where’s your evidence?

Faustusnotes@162:
There doesn’t NEED to be evidence of wrongdoing. The courts have deemed it necessary to take overreaching preventative measures because of flagrant and widespread past wrongdoing by LE organizations. That’s why we have the rules we have.

Additionally, again, for the last time from me: the whole point of parallel construction is to create after-the-fact convincingly-legitimate sources to conceal the provenance of information; its raison d’être is to stop watchdogs and courts – who are experts, not laypersons like us – from looking at a case and saying “the police could not have done this without help.”. So if it was used, there could well be a superficially obvious “source” of the information that the LEOs happened to obtain once they knew when, where, and at whom they needed to look. This is not a crazy gand conspiracy; we know it’s already been done in the past… and pointedly, the only reason we know it was happening was because of whistleblowing.

I’d also point out that upthread you were quick to dismiss as not worth considering any criminals like drug dealers or child pornographers who got nabbed by such methods. Do you think that if these tools were abused, they’d frame people for unpaid parking tickets?

You are arguing that we should allow – nay, encourage – unaccountable methods to be permitted to be used by organizations that have lied to their overseers and the courts about their use of such methods, and you have set a very narrow definition of what you would consider harm, and who must be targeted for the harm to be “legitimate”. Even if we were to accept your arbitrarily narrow criteria for what constitutes demonstrable abuse, there is absolutely no reason we should seek to reduce accountability on organizations that have a history of deceit and subterfuge.

Jerry, once again, why are the police hiding their use of these methods when the methods are legally allowed? (This whole debate is about renewal of a leading that allows them to do this). Why do they invent a flimsy alternative basis for a charge when they have a legal one provided? It’s very convenient for you that you can say they’re doing this, since effectively it could mean they have never ever actually used the laws to target an activist but you can say they did. But why are they doing this, in your theory?

I’ll make it even easier for you, since you can’t provide a shred of evidence. Can you give me a hypothetical example of how the police could abuse these laws to target an innocent activist (or anyone!) Don’t worry about one with a plausible parallel construction, if you don’t want to. Just outline for me how these laws could in theory be abused. We’re 150 comments in and you haven’t done even that much. And I don’t need another vague round of oohs and Asha, I want a specific example. I have given you lots of examples (real and hypothetical) of their benefit. Now you give me even one of their possible harm.

Faustusnotes@163:
We ARE cutting to the chase. You have entirely given up on making an argument based on anything but emotionally charged ad hominem hypotheticals – which is interesting given that even that selfsame comment you ignore real harms done to instead insist that your exceptional fantasy scenario is the norm rather than a wild exception, and complain yet again that those who favor rule of law can’t provide evidence of the effects of LEO abuse of civil liberties. You’ve been angling for a “gotcha” for most of the thread, and now you can without question dismiss everything substantial because your hypothetical scenario lets you paint your opponents as reprehensible for not taking an exceptional scenario as typical on the basis of exactly no evidence beyond “hey, it could happen” and “wouldn’t it be awful if it happened?”

Shall we give you some of your own medicine? If rogue (or just as likely, “rogue”) CIA agents are the ones who find evidence of “an American fucking American children in America and selling the video”, but does so in the context of torturing a foreign national – wait, you’re being extravagant, so why shouldn’t I? – an American citizen, it is your preference that this intelligence “not go to waste”, even if it would mean condoning torture and encouraging more torture. Because that’s the choice we’re facing: waterboarding Americans or letting child pornographers rape children. Right? Grow up. Your argument is pure rhetoric, and the courts, alas, have been no more swayed by your ilk’s attempts to push rule of law onto a slippery slope than I have.

I will also point out that your response above strongly suggests that your request for evidence of “real” harms was made entirely in bad faith, as you’ve now baldly stated that protecting mere civil liberties must necessarily be secondary to finding and sharing evidence of crimes with local authorities. It kinda looks like your exuberance in crowing over springing your cute little rhetorical trap might have made you tip your hand a bit more than you’d intended in that last paragraph. In any case, I’m done here. You couldn’t be any clearer in your apologia for lawbreaking.

TM

I don’t know what Mélenchon voters might have done

Neither do I, obviously. I framed the question with the intention of clarifying part of the issue.

but everybody knew that splitting the left vote would almost certainly lead to this outcome (as it did in 2002).

Is there a reason to use the description ‘splitting the left vote’ for something Mélenchon and La France Insoumise did but not for something Hamon and the PS did?

Also, even if it was splitting the left vote that meant there was no left candidate in the second round, the significance of this is limited if the hypothetical second round is one in which Macron defeats a left candidate; you still end up with the same President.

In any case, I was arguing against the claim that somehow the “wrong” candidate won the election. If either Mélenchon or Hamon didn’t have enough voter support to win the election, then the fact that they didn’t win the election can’t be attributed to a failure of democracy – as much as one might regret this outcome.

I largely agree with that–at least, I’d put it this way: Macron won because he was the candidate the voters wanted to win, and it’s wrong to write the voters and their desires and intentions out of the story. (There is the hypothetical question of whether another candidate could have beaten Macron one-on-one; the opinion polling very strongly suggests not, and although I acknowledge that opinion polls are an imperfect guide, there isn’t a better one.)

Jerry, the intercept article describes a non-american who was convicted on serious terrorism charges after a multi pronged investigation including FBI informants and domestic surveillance with a warrant. I don’t think this guy seems innocent and i don’t see how this has a chilling effect on domestic activism. Sure he should have been informed of the role of warrantless surveillance in his case but it would not have changed anything (he was already under warranted surveillance, apparently from the moment he entered the country). He wasn’t even overseas!

You can surely do better than this?

TM

I’m glad we agree on something.

If I have given you a moment of gladness then my living has not been in vain.

Mélenchon could have participated in the primary of the left, which he might have won.

That’s a good point, which I had not considered. I have to add a caveat, to avoid oversimplification: the terms for that primary were set unilaterally by the PS (the PRG objected to this unilateral action), for members of the PS and other parties belonging to its electoral alliance, so it’s not clear that Mélenchon would have been eligible to participate. Therefore I don’t think he bears all the responsibility for the split. But he (or La France Insoumise) could have sought a widening of the terms to make the primary more clearly a collaboration of the whole left. If the PS had rejected an overture like that, the responsibility for splitting the left would lie with them. But no such overture was made, which shifts more of the responsibility back to Mélenchon and La France Insoumise.

I would have wished for a runoff between a credible left candidate and Macron, not just because the left candidate might have won (yes he might) but for other reasons as well (e.g. the debate would have been very different, Le Pen would have had much less public exposure).

Again, I agree. I hope that gives you another moment of gladness.