Partisanship and the Erosion of Civil Liberties

An interesting trend recently came to my attention regarding the constant erosion of civil liberties within the United States. In the past 6 years, Americans have grown accustomed to viewing conservatives as the defenders of a supercharged executive and a number of unprecedented, questionable national security measures. From the NSA eavesdropping and phone record revelations to Attorney General Gonzalez's dismissal of the international laws against torture; from increasingly militarized police to national ID cards -- conservatives have quickly jumped to defend virtually every action of the Bush administration (even where they had previously been adamantly opposed, such as with national ID cards), no matter how seriously the new programs threatened civil liberties.

In the short collective memory of American politics, this seems to have always been the case. To most people, these programs are a natural extension of the ideas of conservatism, which have always called for strong national defense. There is however much to suggest, contrary to popular belief, that conservatives' support of these programs and claims to absolute executive power have less to do with principle and more to do with partisanship.

Throughout the presidency of Bill Clinton, conservatives regularly decried what they viewed (rightly, in my opinion) as unacceptable expansion of presidential power and disregard for civil liberties. Among the best-known cases of such conservative concerns was the response to Executive Order 12949, which extended the role of the FISA court to include physical searches as well as electronic ones. This vast increase in the power of the extremely secretive FISA court was viewed (again, rightly in my opinion) as a serious threat to civil liberties, since the secrecy of the court made any kind of oversight or check against abuse impossible. Furthermore, evidence obtained through secretly issued warrants could be used against accused criminals in court. Even proponents of the program admitted that it amounted to an obvious contravention of 4th Amendment safeguards. According to an article (link here) on the right-wing site FreeRepublic.com:

[Deputy Attorney General Jamie] Gorelick recently conceded that the government could not gather as much evidence under the traditional standard of the Fourth Amendment.

Contrast this widespread opposition to any challenge to civil liberties by conservatives to the current attitude espoused by most Bush supporters. The same people once outraged with a mere expansion of FISA courts' power are now defending the Bush administration's complete contravention of that entity, an act far more dangerous to civil liberties. The logical conclusion to be drawn from this disparity is that conservatives are only against violations of civil liberties if the person doing the violating is a Democrat.

Some claim that "9/11 changed everything", and that this reversal is merely a logical reaction to the "new world" we live in. While the heightened sense of vulnerability after the 9/11 attacks has certainly contributed to conservatives' newfound disregard for civil liberties, it is hard to believe that Bush supporters would support similar programs had they been initiated by Al Gore. Also, it is hard to explain away such a complete reversal on such a fundamental issue by simply referencing 9/11. The 9/11 attacks could reasonably lead conservatives to view more intrusions on civil liberties as justified up to a point, but not a single one of President Bush's egregious civil rights violations has been widely opposed by conservatives. This total reversal is made more suspicious when one considers the long history of both Democrats' and Republicans' blind partisanship, which has often manifested as hypocritical reversals just like this.

President Clinton justified the expansion of FISA power by pointing to the terrorist attack at Waco, just as President Bush constantly uses 9/11 as a justification for his secret, dangerous programs. While 9/11 was of course larger in scale than the Waco bombing, terrorism had been a major national security concern long before Bush became president. Despite this, conservatives never took the bait, and consistently opposed Clinton's record of disregarding basic freedoms.

No matter what threats were used as justification, conservatives solidly rejected Clinton's intrusions on fundamental freedoms, with some even accusing Clinton of attempting to subvert the Constitution and establish a police-state. Now that President Bush has taken Clinton's disregard for civil liberties to unprecedented new heights -- and especially in our political atmosphere of often malicious partisan division -- one must question to what degree conservative support for these programs is the result of blind partisanship.