Anna Diggs Taylor, But I Don’t
Jimmy Carter is the gift that keeps on giving. One of his most infamous judicial appointments is Anna Diggs Taylor, the justice-loving, apolitical judge who infamously made a “highly irregular” effort to wrest an affirmative action case away from a judge she suspected of holding the wrong views on the issue. Now Taylor has stepped in it further, ruling the NSA surveillance program unconstitutional. The objectively pro-terrorist judge, who enjoys a cush job for life courtesy of the worst President in most of our lifetimes, smarmily patted herself on the back in her written opinion:
Plaintiffs have prevailed, and the public interest is clear, in this matter. It is the upholding of our Constitution.
If you believe that, I’ve got a bridge to sell you. A bridge which, I might add, would not be exist today, but for the wiretaps this idiot judge deemed unconstitutional.
Meanwhile, more dissembling from the usual suspects, while the real scholars are somewhat less impresed by the ruling. Xrlq Goldstein nails it:
Even still, it’s amazing that we’ve reached the nuance point where only by revealing secrets can we show the the secrets in question should not be revealed, lest they damage programs meant to protect us from attacks, which only work while details of how they work remain secret.
Perhaps we can just tie stones to the NSA program, put it in a lake, and see if it floats. If it does, it is clearly unconstitutional and should be hanged. If it drowns from the weight of its own revealed legality, everyone will know for certain that it wasn’t, in fact, unconstitutional. Which, helluva lot of good that does us, sure.
But it’s the thought that counts.
UPDATE: Patterico has more.
August 17th, 2006 at 11:08 pm
“the worst President in most of our lifetimes”
Arguably in all of our lifetimes.
August 18th, 2006 at 12:26 am
Yeah, I was wondering about that, do we still have some Warren Harding people around?
August 18th, 2006 at 9:37 am
Amateur Hour on the Bench…
Judge Anna Diggs-Taylor has ruled that the wiretaps being used to fight the War on Islamofacism is unconstitutional. Attorney Bryan Cunningham (former federal prosecutor under Clinton) tells us why her ruling is little more than a series of blunde…
August 18th, 2006 at 2:18 pm
The “libertarians” Whose Prince has Come…
It would seem that my guest post at Unqualified Offerings, initiating a discussion of what bottom-line principles a person would adhere to before they can be considered libertarian in any coherent sense of the word, has continued apace. Persons who s…
August 18th, 2006 at 4:10 pm
U.S. Judge Nixes Warrantless Wiretaps…
A federal judge struck down the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretapping program, ruling t…
August 18th, 2006 at 4:46 pm
I can’t say that I am familiar enough with either the practices of the NSA program, or the legislation which supposedly grants the power to engage in such activities to render a truly informaed opinion. However if the information gleaned from this program is used as intellignece to track down and kill the enemeies of the United States, I don’t have aproblem with it. If the information is used for criminal prosecutions, I am more than a little uncomfortabe with the executive being given carte blanche to conduct such activities without consulting the judiciary. Frankly though, this is all just window dressing. It will all be forgotten in a day or two.
August 18th, 2006 at 11:30 pm
Well, some of us (not I) were born after 1980.
As for the good judge, ask yourself why the ACLU would bring the case in Detroit? Was it because that area has the largest community of Muslim immigrants? (I don’t know if that’s even true.) Or because the Honorable Diggs-Taylor is well-known to them as a Democrat hack who channels John Conyers from the bench?
Carter himself is no exemplar of providing for our security. He probably thinks he did the Iranian people a great service by abandoning the Shah, thereby allowing the revolution led by Ayatollah Khomeini. Thanks, Jimmy. We should deport him to Iran to live with the results of his policies.
August 21st, 2006 at 5:39 am
REAL scholars? Since when is Jeff “can’t quite get the Ph.D. thing done” a scholar of anything, let alone legal issues. Seeing the quality of his arguments I can undersand why his committe is somewhat loathe to bestow Dr.hood upon him. That you accept his tendentious arguments as valied in the legal sense doesn’t saw much for you. Aren’t libertarians supposed to like the Bill of Rights?
August 21st, 2006 at 9:08 am
Hey brain_less, where do you get your information from? Same place you learned to spell and reason, I presume? Contrary to your claim my Ph.D. “committe” was “loathe” to grant me anything, I quit grad school voluntarily after three years to begin law school, after passing all three comprehensive exams with flying colors, and long before there was any dissertation to defend before any committee, “loathe” or otherwise. The reason I quit was to attend a law school even more elite than yours, Glenn Greenwald’s, Thomas Ellers’s, Ryan’s and Ellison’s combined. The only reason I didn’t take up the Ph.D. again after that was because it was in an field, and would have kept me out of gainful employment for at least another year while doing nothing for me professionally. So what area is your Ph.D. in, Doctor? Orthography, maybe? Or maybe something relating to logic. I can’t wait to hear you “saw” out loud what your “valied” theory is which dictates that anyone who likes the Bill of Rights is obligated to endorse every tortured, ostensibly legal argument that invokes it.
August 21st, 2006 at 11:47 am
Goldstien’s quote says:
Yeah, well, that’s a pretty clever observation, except that the flip side argument is just as absurd — that the government’s programs against terrorism only work if we have no idea what they are or how effective they are. So when we ask “uh, how’s that fight against terrorism going” they say “we can’t tell you, or we’ll lose.” And when we say “uh, you’re spying on everyone. How do we know you’re actually using the information for fighting terrorism?” They say “well, we can’t tell you how we’re using this information, because if we do, it won’t work anymore.”
Granted, it’s possible that these super-secret operations are actually working. But considering what disasters the non-secret operations have turned out to be, it’s hard to have confidence when they tell us that the reall problem isn’t that they’re incompetent terrorist fighters — it’s that we keep asking them to prove that they’re NOT incompetent terrorist fighters.
August 21st, 2006 at 12:52 pm
What post-911 “disasters” are you talking about, Phil? We’ve gone almost five years without a major attack on U.S. soil; doesn’t that count for something? Also, it’s more than “possible” that the NSA wiretaps are actually working; it’s a proven fact that they are, or at least were before those traitors broke the story last year. I gave one concrete example in the main post, namely that of Iyman Faris. Faris, like Mohammed Atta and countless others, was not on anybody’s terrorist list. NSA had no reason to target him in particular, nor could they have gotten a warrant to do so even if they had wanted one. But they did monitor international chatter randomly, and repeated references to the Brooklyn Bridge piqued their interest. As a result of this “illegal” program, the bridge is still standing, and Lord knows how many individuals are alive today who, according to Diggs Taylor’s version of the law, should not be.
August 22nd, 2006 at 10:05 am
OK, you’re right, Faris was apparently caught by the monitoring program. Or so say the people who won’t let us ask anything about the program, and won’t provide any details of how he was caught. This example, at least based to your link, does not make me feel better:
“The only known terror case that the program contributed to is Faris,’ the Ohio truck driver who pleaded guilty in 2003 to helping al Qaeda by possibly plotting to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge. ”
“Government officials familiar with the program confirmed to CNN that wiretaps under the program helped lead authorities to Faris, but the officials provided no details.”
So we have one suspect who the government claims was caught by the program but “provided no details.” That’s not exactly heartwarmingly reassuring.
You said: As a result of this “illegal” program, the bridge is still standing, and Lord knows how many individuals are alive today.”
This is empty rhetoric. Just because this idiot was planning to blow up the Brooklyn bridge doesn’t mean that his plan wouldn’t have been foiled without random eavesdropping. And it’s a ridiculous plot anyway — as terrorist attacks go, blowing up the Brooklyn bridge has got to be way up there in the “high effort, low reward” category of targets.
Finally, you’re right, “Lord knows how many individuals are alive today” as a result of this program. The problem is, nobody else does. That’s no justification at all.
August 22nd, 2006 at 10:57 am
How would it have been? The guy was not a known or suspected terrorist, and wasn’t on anyone’s radar screen.
August 22nd, 2006 at 5:13 pm
When you try to blow up the Brooklyn bridge, you have to do more than just engage in idle chatter over communications channels. It’s a massive hulk of concrete and metal in the middle of a large body of water, clearly exposed on all sides to observation by one of the most densely populated areas in the world. Who did this guy think he was, David Blain? David Copperfield?
Also, if you really want to “blow up” something, you should pick something with at least some potential to explode. The Brooklyn bridge will never “blow up” — at best, this guy would be able to collapse a couple small segments of the brooklyn bridge by detonating massive amounts of explosives on/under/beside it. A few dozen people, at most, would likely be killed. And any efforts to do so would likely be pretty visible to anyone nearby.
That’s why the government’s hesitation to provide details of this guys plan implies to me that, very likely, he’s even dumber than the airline shoe bomber, and had a lot less chance than the shoe bomber of ever accomplishing his goals. And he’s their shining example of why random evesdropping works . . .
August 22nd, 2006 at 6:02 pm
Not the shining example, just the known one among many more clandestine ones.
August 23rd, 2006 at 3:45 pm
Oh yeah. Phbttt.
August 29th, 2006 at 10:18 am
May I mambo dog-face in the banana patch?
August 29th, 2006 at 11:21 am
Huh?
August 30th, 2006 at 10:09 am
Well, if you are going to be that way….