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It's taken awhile, a little more than five years to be precise, but we may be witnessing the return of a respected and important political ideology in this town: conservatism....

Last week....some of the senators on the right side of the dais wondered aloud about whether the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program went too far in the way of expanding executive power....

Lindsey Graham...Heather Wilson....

Why was this significant? Because conservatism, real conservatism with its distrust of government and radical change, has been in short supply in our nation's capital since 2001. Oh, there are Republicans, and they have controlled the political landscape here since then. But there is a difference between Republicanism and conservatism.

Republicans are a party, concerned ultimately, as all parties are, with maintaining and growing power. And the GOP in particular is disciplined about doing whatever it takes to help their president. Conservatism is a political outlook, one that questions what the state is doing and is skeptical of power. It owes nothing to no one - not the president, nor the Congress. And it is crucial as a counterbalance to liberalism in the proper functioning of the government. It is the arched eyebrow in a room full of ideas.

Other than its belief in tax cuts (a cornerstone of the conservative philosophy), the current administration has hardly been conservative....

Yet many conservatives in Congress...[have] urged the president on....

The administration is proposing what is essentially an unchecked power for the president (not just this president, but all presidents) during the "war on terror."...

And since when have conservatives been eager to give the president extra powers?...

But there is a principle at stake here as well, and it only makes sense that the party that distrusts and dislikes federal power assert itself in the argument.

If we're lucky it means the conservatives are ready to make themselves a serious part of the political discussion in Washington again. Who knows, maybe it'll even wake up the liberals.

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A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasure. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most money from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship.

The average age of the world's great civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through the following sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith, from spiritual faith to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependency, from dependency back to bondage.

bikemanb

Feb 15 2006, 10:33 PM

Remember, contrary to what many like to believe, we in the middle class are the largest benefactors of the public largess.

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The next time a president asks Congress to pass something akin to what Congress passed on Sept. 14, 2001 -- the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) -- the resulting legislation might be longer than Proust's ``Remembrance of Things Past.'' Congress, remembering what is happening today, might stipulate all the statutes and constitutional understandings that it does not intend the act to repeal or supersede.

But, then, perhaps no future president will ask for such congressional involvement in the gravest decision government makes -- going to war. Why would future presidents ask, if the present administration successfully asserts its current doctrine? It is that whenever the nation is at war, the other two branches of government have a radically diminished pertinence to governance, and the president determines what that pertinence shall be. This monarchical doctrine emerges from the administration's stance that warrantless surveillance by the National Security Agency targeting American citizens on American soil is a legal exercise of the president's inherent powers as commander in chief, even though it violates the clear language of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which was written to regulate wartime surveillance.

Administration supporters incoherently argue that the AUMF authorized the NSA surveillance -- and that if the administration had asked, Congress would have refused to authorize it. The first assertion is implausible: None of the 518 legislators who voted for the AUMF has said that he or she then thought it contained the permissiveness the administration now discerns in it. Did the administration, until the program became known two months ago? Or was the AUMF then seized upon as a justification? Equally implausible is the idea that in the months after 9/11, Congress would have refused to revise the 1978 law in ways that would authorize, with some supervision, NSA surveillance that, even in today's more contentious climate, most serious people consider conducive to national security.

Anyway, the argument that the AUMF contained a completely unexpressed congressional intent to empower the president to disregard the FISA regime is risible coming from this administration. It famously opposes those who discover unstated meanings in the Constitution's text and do not strictly construe the language of statutes.

The administration's argument about the legality of the NSA program also has been discordant with the administration's argument about the urgency of extending the Patriot Act. Many provisions of that act are superfluous if a president's wartime powers are as sweeping as today's president says they are.

And if, as some administration supporters say, amending the 1978 act to meet today's exigencies would have given to America's enemies dangerous information about our capabilities and intentions, surely the 1978 act and the Patriot Act were both informative. Intelligence professionals reportedly say that the behavior of suspected terrorists has changed since Dec. 16, when The New York Times revealed the NSA surveillance. But surely America's enemies have assumed that our technologically sophisticated nation has been trying, in ways known and unknown, to eavesdrop on them.

Besides, terrorism is not the only new danger of this era. Another is the administration's argument that because the president is commander in chief, he is the ``sole organ for the nation in foreign affairs.'' That non sequitur is refuted by the Constitution's plain language, which empowers Congress to ratify treaties, declare war, fund and regulate military forces and make laws ``necessary and proper'' for the execution of all presidential powers. Those powers do not include deciding that a law -- FISA, for example -- is somehow exempted from the presidential duty to ``take care that the laws be faithfully executed.''

The administration, in which mere obduracy sometimes serves as political philosophy, pushes the limits of assertion while disdaining collaboration. This faux toughness is folly, given that the Supreme Court, when rejecting President Truman's claim that his inherent powers as commander in chief allowed him to seize steel mills during the Korean War, held that presidential authority is weakest when it clashes with Congress.

Immediately after 9/11, the president rightly did what he thought the emergency required, and rightly thought that the 1978 law was inadequate to new threats posed by a new kind of enemy using new technologies of communication. Arguably he should have begun surveillance of domestic-to-domestic calls -- the kind the 9/11 terrorists made.

But 53 months later, Congress should make all necessary actions lawful by authorizing the president to take those actions, with suitable supervision. It should do so with language that does not stigmatize what he has been doing, but that implicitly refutes the doctrine that the authorization is superfluous.