Tag: United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court

Republicans have revealed that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) treats Americans not as citizens, but as subjects to spy on. Mueller has taken possession of “many tens of thousands of emails from President Donald Trump’s transition team.” There is no limit, seemingly, to the power of the special counsel. Such damage pales compared to what we Americans have done to a compact rooted in the consent of the governed and the drastically limited and delimited powers of those who govern. To arrive at a democracy, we Americans destroyed a republic. That thing of beauty is called the Tenth Amendment: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” That’s right. In American federalism, the rights of the individual were meant to be secured through strict limits imposed on the power of the central government by a Bill of Rights and the division of authority between autonomous states and a federal government. Some are even prattling about a constitutional cannabis amendment, as if there’s a need for further "constitutional" centralization of authority. After 230 years of just such “constitutional” consolidation, it’s safe to say that the original Constitution is a dead letter; that the natural, and common law traditions, once lodestars for lawmakers, have been buried under the rubble of legislation and statute that would fill an entire building floor. Consider: America’s Constitution makers bequeathed a central government of delegated and enumerated powers. The welfare clause stipulates that "Congress will have the power … to provide for the general welfare."