Abortion has been-and probably will continue to be for a long while-the political fault line dividing Republicans and Democrats. In those infrequent instances when openings arise on Supreme Court-which has been relatively frequent lately-abortion is the hot-button issue for sizing up high-court nominees.
But this is a new day, made so by the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks against the United States. So it was that Samuel A. Alito Jr. received almost as many questions about whether he would overturn Roe v. Wade as he did about President Bush’s four-year-old program allowing the National Security Agency to wiretap phone calls without court orders. Yes, Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee-foaming at the mouth to find a filibuster-worthy issue-were the ones raising the wiretap issue. But Republicans have concerns, too.
Indeed, U.S. District Judge James Robertson, a member of the secret court that handles government requests to wiretap individuals suspected of having links to terrorists and foreign spies, resigned last month in protest over a stealth electronic surveillance program that was not supposed to become public. Now U.S. officials want to know who leaked the information to The New York Times.
President Bush said he welcomes a hearing on the now not-so-secret warrantless wiretap program. In Texas-speak: “Bring it on!”
The wiretaps at issue are covered by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, not the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act governing U.S. law enforcement surveillance. Either way, U.S. mobile-phone carriers must comply with both statutes and the nation’s 200 million cellular subscribers are implicated. So, too, are all the bad guys, who tend to be big-bucket users of mobile phones.
Where does Alito, a judge on the 3rd U.S. Circuit of Court of Appeals, come down on all this? “The president has to comply with the Fourth Amendment and the president has to comply with the statutes that are passed,” said Alito. “This is an issue … that I think is very likely to result in litigation in the federal courts. It could be in my court. It certainly could get to the Supreme Court. And there may be statutory issues involved: the meaning of the provision of FISA that you mentioned; the meaning, certainly, of the authorization for the use of military force. And those would have to be resolved.”
Americans are understandably conflicted about all this. We want the homeland protected. We want to be safe. But we do not want to surrender civil liberties in the process. A tough balancing act, for sure.
There is a practical, laughable aspect to Wiretapgate. It could be argued the real villain is not the White House, but the millions of rude cell-phone users who have made us an unwilling nation of eavesdroppers by forcing us to listen to their inane phone conversations in restaurants, elevators, subway trains, theaters, department stores-everywhere. Were the Concerned Alumni of Princeton still in force today, I bet they’d have a thing or two to say about this untoward phone etiquette.
