If President Trump wants to drain the swamp, he absolutely must veto the atrocious surveillance “reform” bill the House of Representatives passed Wednesday night. Politicians don’t deserve special protections that aren’t granted to everyday citizens — but that’s what this swampy bill would do.
Right now, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, created after 9/11 to allow for the surveillance of foreign nationals suspected of possible terrorism, has created a rubber-stamp process whereby the federal government can spy on Americans essentially at will.
The House FISA reextension bill reauthorizes this surveillance with only some meager reforms, such as raising the penalties for abuses, bringing advocates against surveillance into the process in more instances — how every judge signing off on warrants to spy on Americans aren’t already presented with arguments against spying is beyond me — and imposing modest limits on what types of data the government can access.
But perhaps the most objectionable part of this bill is the special protection it adds for federal elected officials and candidates for federal offices.
It mandates that if the government seeks to spy on either an official or candidate, it must first get approval from the attorney general, the highest level of our justice system. This is, at first glance, well-warranted, given that an inspector general report showed highly improper surveillance of the Trump campaign during the 2016 election through the FISA system. (Of course, it’s far from clear that this added step would actually prevent the awarding of improper FISA warrants: Obama-era attorney general Eric Holder “signed a lot of them” during his tenure.)
Yet politicians deserve no special protections not afforded to everyday Americans. If the system’s protections for due process and respect for privacy aren’t good enough for our politicians, then they aren’t good enough for any of us.
We all have Fourth Amendment rights to privacy, from the lowest in our society to our highest elected officials. It’s absolutely nauseating that establishment leaders from both parties think members of Congress deserve special bonus protections for their civil liberties and privacy, as if they’re too good to play by the rules they would impose on the rest of us.
This glaring hypocrisy was quickly noted by constitutional conservatives and libertarian-leaning Republicans such as Sen. Rand Paul, Sen. Mike Lee, and Rep. Chip Roy:
Weak sauce reform requires Attorney General to sign off on political FISA warrants. Obama AG Holder signed them all the time. Do you really think he wouldn’t do it again @realDonaldTrump? This doesn’t fix the problem! Let’s do real reform now! https://t.co/EjnC8atwh0
— Senator Rand Paul (@RandPaul) March 11, 2020
The FISA draft is more than disappointing… it provides protections for politicians but not citizens. @realDonaldTrump should veto rather than perpetuating the very deep state swamp he went to DC to drain. #FISAReform
— Chip Roy (@chiproytx) March 10, 2020
Even where the House FISA / PATRIOT Act deal claims to offer modest protection for political candidates and elected officials, it doesn’t provide the same protection for the American people! @realDonaldTrump has asked for real FISA reforms, not fake ones. Sad!
— Mike Lee (@SenMikeLee) March 11, 2020
Trump should veto this bill and demand real reform to the FISA system that respects the rights of all citizens and authorizes surveillance against U.S. citizens only when a very high standard is met, if at all. If Trump acquiesces to a reauthorization of the surveillance system that privileges the Washington elite, the president will be preserving the same swamp he promised the public he would drain.
