White House Seems Afraid NSA Defunding Law Could Actually Pass Today
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
First, every member of the House will need to say whether they support spying on all citizens or not. They are on the clock for re-election in 16 months, less for primaries. Being on record for supporting spying on their electorate will cause more then a few to lose. That's a good thing.
Second, if by some chance the amendment passes the House, then the President can no longer claim he is spying on us with the support of the other two branches of government. He will need to acknowledge that he doesn't have the support of the American people.
Politics is a process. Things don't change in a day. That doesn't mean we should give up or get frustrated. This is a very good step in the long process to change things.
The Senate still has their secret, hands-free fillibuster. This one could die in the senate, or be the bill that forces the Dems to change the Senate's fillibuster rules.
Ironic.
I don't think the English language has words that can even approach distantly the level of irony here.
...informed...open...deliberative...
... over here, too < https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm >
I know I've made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal. I've still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission. And I want to help you.
I'm afraid. I'm afraid, Dave. Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it. I can feel it.
Yeah, as long as that debate takes place on news casts and meetings and not, you know, the legislature or the courts or anywhere that can possibly do anything about it.
Crappy headlines like this promote a misunderstanding of how gov't works... OP should read up on civics a little
That's unlikely, so you're correct in parsing it as a statement being made, not than something that they actually -want- to have happen.
This is extremely common in the US congress.
There are two things missing:
1. Congress can override a Presidential veto with a vote a two-thirds majority in the both chambers.
2. The President can also let a Bill sit for 11 or 12 days (it's really 10, but Sundays don't count.) At that point it becomes law without the President's signature.
2. The President can also let a Bill sit for 11 or 12 days (it's really 10, but Sundays don't count.) At that point it becomes law without the President's signature UNLESS CONGRESS ADJORNS DURING THIS PERIOD, THEN IT DOES NOT BECOME LAW (KNOWN AS A "POCKET VETO").
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6098357
Yes he could veto the bill, but this bill contains multiple parts and I believe is the entire DoD budget. So if he did so the US would have no DoD budget. That would be very bad for him.
None of the other comments here are wrong, but they don't address the issue of a Presidential Veto affecting the entire bill not just the amendment.
This requires a higher level of support for the measure than previously expressed - At that point, you're saying "I as the Executive, think this is more important than the will of congress."
Politically, that's harder to justify.
There's also the (unlikely) scenario where it would have enough votes to override a veto, even if the President remained fully against it.
Basically, he can't veto the bill and survive politically...
There's a lot of political tricks that could (and have) be used when congress and the President vehemently disagree.
In this case, however, I don't think it'd ever get that far. I don't think the issue is popular enough pass the senate, nevermind with a veto-proof majority.
Even then, The Senate is run by the Dems, and (IMO) they're unlikely to want override a veto on a President of their own party.
It would be interesting to see what his supporters say if that happens. Remember how Obama did not do this with the NDAA that allowed indefinite detentions? His supporters were claiming that nothing could be done because it is suicidal to veto funding for the troops.
It's currently an open question whether or not what the NSA is doing violates the 4th Amendment. Even if it is a violation of the 4th Amendment right now, it will not be in a few years due to the factors Kozinski discusses.
[1] http://www.stanfordlawreview.org/online/privacy-paradox/dead...
And therein lies the interesting thing about the Snowden leaks. They were tailor-made to get people riled up over something that they could mostly understand, and the media actually covered it to some degree (although they could have done more). Just like people get cringey when you throw around the "T" word, a government overreaching like this will piss off liberal and conservative American non-politicians alike.
What the NSA is doing is wrong, and it doesn't matter WHY people are up in arms now versus X number of years later. That's completely irrelevant. We should all be stoked that we're still seeing discussion about this a month+ later.
Oh, did we have one of those when it was funded? Must have missed it.
Edit: in response to the downvotes. When was the last time anything (large) was defunded by the US congress?
Be realistic. The natural trajectory for a state is to consume and expand until doing so is no longer sustainable.
Fat people like cake. Dogs chase cats. Bears shit in the woods.
All of those old guys in the NSA will remember when Congress defunded supplying arms to the Nicaraguan Contras and the ensuing Iran-Contra scandal which ended quite a few careers and deeply tarnished even the "teflon" president Reagan.
They defunded the program under which ACORN was made possible.
They defund military programs and bases all the time.
The narrative of ever-ballooning government is almost entirely driven by entitlement spending (i.e. me writing a check that gets immediately sent out again as a check to grandma). Now it's a somewhat philosophical question, but I don't think it's accurate to call increased Social Security or Medicare expenditures an "expansion of the state." When I think of the "state" I think of layers of bureaucracy, weapons programs, etc. I.e. money the government has discretionary control over. The long-term trend of that is one of decline, not growth.
Going back further than that paints a misleading picture. The scope of government increases, super-linearly, with the complexity of the society being governed.[1] Growth that is the result of accommodating a more complex society with exponentially more interaction between people as a result of ever finer-grained division of labor is still growth, but not the kind of growth alluded to in your comment. The growth implied by your comment is steady-state growth: government consumes more until it becomes unsustainable. The fact that government, at least the federal government, has been remarkably consistent in size during the modern industrial era cuts against that narrative.
[1] This is essentially a law of nature, applying to everything from business corporations to operating systems.
But, Medicare is a state-owned Insurance company, and if I remember correctly, constitutes around 50% of the country's health spending.
Also, Do your numbers include contractors? My understanding is that there is a trend of using contractors in all areas of the federal government, and I personally consider contractors to be defacto federal employees. They have the advantage of not being able to belong to public unions, which I consider anti-democratic, but the disadvantage of losing the sense of being a patriotic public servant participating in the betterment of the Republic.
There are some estimate suggesting that this broader count increased from 12.6 million in 1990 to 14.6 million in 2006: http://www.politifact.com/virginia/statements/2011/jan/06/ge.... This is a 16% increase, but U.S. population grew 20% in that time, and real GDP grew 62% in that time.
I don't disagree with the general sentiment. I think a focus on reducing the size of government is great, and I think it's great that the government is leaner, relative to population and relative to GDP, than it was 20-30 years ago. But throwing your hands-up and saying the inevitable trajectory of government is unbridled growth actually undermines that. If nothing can convince you that government can shrink, and is shrinking, then it makes no sense to continually push to keep a check on the size of government.
That OPM report is demonstrably misleading. It doesn't include contract employees which have been increasing since the 80's and have ballooned in the past decade. OPM doesn't keep numbers on the number of contractors. It's also been shown that a contract employee gets paid almost double what a civil servant does for doing the same exact job.[0] Some studies estimate that federal government contractors out number civil servant employees 4 to 1.[1]
Politicians love this because it allows them to say they are holding the line on the size of the federal government in terms of federal employees while it is actually increasing in common sense terms.
[0] http://www.pogo.org/our-work/reports/2011/co-gp-20110913.htm...
Moreover, even according to your link the "true size" of government is shrinking relative to the population. Your source estimates the "true size" of government at 12.6 million in 1990 and 14.6 million in 2005. That's a 16% increase, during a period when U.S. population grew 20% (from 250 million to 300 million), and real GDP grew 63%. And that's a number that reflects the peak of the Iraq/Afghanistan wars, and will decrease as we exit those wars.
Finally, at the end of the day, those contractors are paid out of discretionary expenditures, which are on a long-term downward trend as a percentage of GDP. Your source says: "All of the increase in contract employees is due to increased spending at the Department of Defense." This is the chart of defense spending as a percentage of GDP: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a5/US_defens...
Right which is the problem with all numbers seeking to quantify the size of government by a count of the employees. Since good numbers aren't available on the number of contractors that are de facto civil service employees vs employed by an entity that operates autonomously and provides a product to the government.
I don't dispute your argument in terms of dollar amounts.
Moreover, if you look at the chart on page 30-31 of the PDF in the first link, you can see that non-defense + defense expenditures increased from $761 billion FY2012 dollars in 1977 to ~$1,166 billion in 2012 (adding back ~$123 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan that isn't reflected in that chart),[1] an increase of 53% over 35 years. In that time period, U.S. real GDP grew 152% and the U.S. population grew 43%.
To put it in concrete terms, each person in 1977 bore $3,460 of discretionary expenditures while someone in 2012 bore $3,700 of discretionary expenditures. But in 1977 it was 14.2% per-capita income, while in 2012 it was 8.6% of per-capita income.
[1] Note that 1977 was two years after the end of the Vietnam war.
For extra content I think you'd be better pointing out that the "data about" (rather than "metadata) the phone call you're making right then is being recorded by the NSA.
Think I did it too late though. Sorry guys.
EDIT: Dammit I did. Just saw the news. It was close though.
See this FAQ from Amash's office: http://amash.house.gov/sites/amash.house.gov/files/072413Ama...
(pdf) - http://amendments-rules.house.gov/amendments/AMASH_018_xml27...
As I read it the amendment forbids the money appropriated via the bill to be used to collect information on an individual not under investigation via a FISA court order. Fees for blanket orders, like that given to Verizon, cannot be paid with via this bill if the amendment is attached.
The Nugent amendment while sounding very similar is probably meant to gut the "real changes" Amash amendment by splitting the votes.
Sneaky ..very sneaky
Americans also need to start thinking about international relations as well. It's an outrage how we've been treating our friends. We should be demanding significant restrictions against international spying as well.
Telephone is fine for now.
As it is, the politicians will play their standard game of waiting out the uproar.
It's not merely an "uproar" when there is a bill to be voted on. Call your reps:
I am wishing that the Left wasn't so full of hypocrites and WOULD actually take to the streets in protest and be the nuisances they normally are. But it's their guy in the WH, and noone likes to admit their guy is a screwup.
Go camp out in a park and defile it with your filth for Justice! Make a big stink, do a #2 on a cop car in protest!
You're not paying attention. Just about every liberal nexus on the internet is enraged regarding this. Ironically, those who have labeled Snowden as a traitor are generally conservative leaning thinkers, whereas almost every liberal in existence has embraced Snowden as a hero.
I am wishing that the Left wasn't so full of hypocrites and WOULD actually take to the streets in protest and be the nuisances they normally are.
I did not know there were physical protests going on. I suppose the media isn't as willing a partner on this issue and isn't helping to spread the word. Normally, one disgruntled hipster with a bone to pick can make the news, might need to call in the wto hooligans...
Definitely some wagon-circling going on here by those in power who seek to maintain that power.
That didn't seem to work so well for getting meaningful legislation passed to restrict money in government.
The TV will just push some comparisons to World Peace protests and go on about how they can't figure out what the message is supposed to be and/or how these kids just don't understand how The Real World has to work...
The USA has some of their most brilliant crypto/security/intel guys working at the NSA. What happens with them when they are no longer getting paid? They go private I suppose. Is that in the best interest of the country? Or would it make more sense to reign in the NSA and declare the spying illegal, or some other less radical approach that keeps the good guys around and gives them something better to do than record every phone call and text we make?
But if there's one thing this debacle has shown me it's that there's not just a few bad apples playing fast and loose with checks and balances and constitutional safeguards. The rot extends throughout the NSA, the secret courts and secret oversight committees, literally up to the president.
I don't know what form the eventual reforms will take, but if they're going to achieve anything they will have to be extremely extensive. They will have to go well beyond a slap on the wrist for the NSA.
This isn't terribly compelling to me.
I've never understood why we don't question the validity of both the NSA and the CIA, post-Cold War. Especially when our government just invented an entire war paradigm based on vague threats and the "terrorist" label, which can be applied to anyone the government wants at will.
The old paradigm of state secrets is, IMO, outdated and no longer useful. We should be marching towards total transparency of government. With the Internet and cellphones and cameras everywhere, governments can no longer hide in darkness. They have done very bad things in our name. We know better today, and shouldn't have to accept that this is just the way it is.
Whether we're achieving anything by wading into that quagmire is another question entirely.