Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., keeps getting under the skin of the NSA’s biggest supporters with his warnings about intelligence agency abuses — and the latest dispute resulted in a high-profile dustup on the Senate floor on Thursday.
Wyden said the public needs to know about a secret court opinion that found fault with the Trump administration’s use of data collected by the National Security Agency, prompting Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Tom Cotton, R-Ark., to warn of “consequences” for “distorting highly classified material.”
The unusually pointed back-and-forth came amid a fight over the reauthorization of a controversial domestic spying program. The barbs exchanged by the senators highlighted how much Wyden has angered colleagues aligned with the NSA who want the spy program to be renewed without changes.
By the end of the day, Congress voted to give the program a 45-day extension to allow further negotiations over its fate.
It should be very concerning to hear Tom Cotton making threats like this. Especially considering he and JD Vance have both publicly supported Greater Good Constitutionalism, the legal theory created by Harvard law professor and their fellow “anti-elitist,” Adrien Vermeule.
Vermeule argues all law, is meant to be interpreted by the highest authority. That’s why executive authority “Trumps” judicial.
Most importantly, his theory explicitly states 🚨🚨 the constitution is not meant to uphold liberty, but to be interpreted by a modern authority in order to promote the greater good. 🚨🚨
In other words, a violation of your constitutional rights isn’t necessarily a violation of the constitution, as long as an authority claims doing so is necessary for the greater good. Liberty is a necessary sacrifice for the “safety” of all Americans. Whatever an authority does, he’s doing it for your own good whether you like it or not. If you refuse to see it that way, then you become a threat to America’s safety.
So, where is the line drawn? Wherever the authority, who is guided by his own moral compass, determines it should be drawn.
If you’re thinking, hey, that sounds an awful lot like the slippery slope that helped create Nazi Germany, it’s because it’s the same slippery slope rebranded for modern day America.
Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, often referred to as the “legal architect” of Nazi Germany, is one of Vermeule’s greatest inspirations.