Senator Dianne Feinstein has had a busy year. She kicked off 2013 by leading the charge against “assault weapons,” Nerf guns with extra plastic glued on. When the California Democrat’s gun control amendment decisively failed, she turned to defending extra-judicial targeted killing of American citizens with drone aircraft. Then Edward Snowden pushed intelligence officials into the spotlight without their usual kabuki stage makeup.
Right on cue, the self-styled “chairman” of the intelligence committee threw herself into tireless apologetics. The NSA’s indiscriminate collection of telephone metadata is of dubious utility and faces dubious oversight from the hamstrung Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Yet Feinstein, a senior member of the judiciary committee as well, insists the agency does nothing illegal. They have nothing to hide, so please stop asking what they are hiding. Now, after taking shots at the Second, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments, she has set her sights on the First. When it comes to the Bill of Rights, never say Di.
A notable act of White House damage control this spring was the championing of a journalist shield law President Obama previously opposed. It would purportedly strengthen American press freedom, protecting journalists from being forced to disclose confidential sources by subpoena or court order. A common thread running through the Obama’s scandals is suppression of dissent. The current administration brags about prosecuting six leakers under the 1917 Espionage Act, twice as many as all previous administrations combined. Adams, Wilson, FDR, and Nixon had their own methods, to be sure, but President Obama’s crackdown on puts him in such company.
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