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The people we elect aren’t the ones calling the shots, says Tufts University’s Michael Glennon. Others at SN have also voiced similar opinions so I thought this might be an interesting read for our members.
The voters who put Barack Obama in office expected some big changes. From the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping to Guantanamo Bay to the Patriot Act, candidate Obama was a defender of civil liberties and privacy, promising a dramatically different approach from his predecessor.
But six years into his administration, the Obama version of national security looks almost indistinguishable from the one he inherited. Guantanamo Bay remains open. The NSA has, if anything, become more aggressive in monitoring Americans. Drone strikes have escalated. Most recently it was reported that the same president who won a Nobel Prize in part for promoting nuclear disarmament is spending up to $1 trillion modernizing and revitalizing America’s nuclear weapons.
Why did the face in the Oval Office change but the policies remain the same? Critics tend to focus on Obama himself, a leader who perhaps has shifted with politics to take a harder line. But Tufts University political scientist Michael J. Glennon has a more pessimistic answer: Obama couldn’t have changed policies much even if he tried.
Though it’s a bedrock American principle that citizens can steer their own government by electing new officials, Glennon suggests that in practice, much of our government no longer works that way. In a new book, “National Security and Double Government,” he catalogs the ways that the defense and national security apparatus is effectively self-governing, with virtually no accountability, transparency, or checks and balances of any kind. He uses the term “double government”: There’s the one we elect, and then there’s the one behind it, steering huge swaths of policy almost unchecked. Elected officials end up serving as mere cover for the real decisions made by the bureaucracy.
[Related]: ‘National Security and Double Government’
(Score: 3) by frojack on Tuesday October 21 2014, @09:42PM
Sorry to say it, but appeals to the constitution are laughed at in every courthouse in the nation.
Every lawyer and judge snickers up their sleeve when anybody raises a constitutional issue.
The constitution has no teeth. There is no punishment for violating it once you are in government.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by tathra on Tuesday October 21 2014, @10:26PM
there is, its just nobody is enforcing it.
5 U.S. Code § 7311 - Loyalty and striking [cornell.edu]
ignoring/undermining the constitution = overthrowing or advocating the overthrow of our constitutional form of government. if our representatives aren't respecting the constitution, we no longer have a constitutional form of government.
18 U.S. Code § 1918 - Disloyalty and asserting the right to strike against the Government [cornell.edu]
every federal employee who ignores, undermines, suggests to ignore or undermine the constitution, or knows their coworkers or superiors do is to be locked up for a year, fined, or both.