Barbara Mikulski Betrays Her Oath To Defend the ConstitutionBarbara Mikulski has been in the United States Senate for so long that she seems to have forgotten what her Oath of Office was upon entering the Senate. In that Oath of Office, Mikulski vowed to protect the Constitution from enemies foreign and domestic. Now, Senator Mikulski is voting for the FISA Amendments Act. The FISA Amendments Act does not uphold the Constitution. It attacks the Constitution. First, it's an ex post facto law, changing the consequences of a crime after someone has been caught committing the crime, for the very purpose of protecting the criminals. That's strictly forbidden in the first section of the Constitution, but Barbara Mikulski doesn't seem to care about that. Second, the FISA Amendments Act establishes some legal standards for some people, and different legal standards for others. Giant telecommunications companies get off the hook for violating the privacy agreements they made with their customers, but others who may have committed the same crime don't get off the hook. That's against the fourteenth amendment's guarantee of equal protection under the law. Third, the fourth amendment guarantees protection against unreasonable search and seizure and requires a search warrant against a specific person in a specific place if government spying or physical searches are to take place. The FISA Amendments Act doesn't do that - it gives blanket permission to spy, without requiring the specification of any particular people or places that will be spied against. Furthermore the FISA Amendments Act gives the Attorney General the power to make declarations that the Attorney General's spy operations against the American people are legal - and those declarations cannot be challenged by the FISA court or anyone else. So, in effect, any spy program against Americans that the Attorney General declares to be legal can not be challenged, even if it actually breaks the law. That's not just a violation of the fourth amendment. It's also a violation of the concept of the separation of government power into coequal branches that provide controls on each other. That concept is at the core of the Constitution. Without it, the Constitution means almost nothing. Barbara Mikulski supports the FISA Amendments Act, and that means that she supports all these attacks on the Constitution. Senator Mikulski has become one of the enemies of the Constitution she swore an Oath to work against. That's why Democrats who still care about the Constitution are turning their backs on Barbara Mikulski, and organizing to challenge her right to represent the Democratic Party in the United States Senate when she is up for re-election in 2010. |
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