Resolutions

Today, U.S. District Judge Anna Taylor issued an injunction against the Bush administration, preventing them from furthering their warrentless wiretapping program. This is a serious issue that has been neglected as-of-late due to many, MANY other problems the President's administration has caused, but remains one of the most important we face. Which is why it is so important that Judge Taylor got this one right.
Judge Taylor ruled that the warrentless wiretapping program violated not only FISA, the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act, but also the First and Fourth Amendment. What does that mean? It means that not only did Bush knowingly violate the laws that were passed by Congress, but also our civil rights . Specifically, the First amendment's protection of both free speech and the press, but also our right to be protected from searches or seizures by the government without a warrent. Wow, look at that; our founding fathers saw this coming and specifically placed a provision in our most sacred document pertaining to this very situation, and Bush STILL saw fit to violate it. She found that the program violated our rights in multiple ways, and thus issued the injunction permanently stopping he and his administration from continuing to violate our rights.
What I find appaling, besides the President's blatant disregard for the laws he was sworn to uphold(twice), is the administrations response to the ruling.

The Justice Department appealed the ruling and issued a statement calling the program "an essential tool for the intelligence community in the war on terror."

It's just incredible that they don't even care that they were violating the law and endangering the very way of life they are so "Concerned" with protecting. They don't care. Their response wasn't, "Here is why the judge is wrong, here is our precident", or even, "We were obviously wrong, as this judge has now told us"; they just don't get it. It isn't about whether or not it is a useful program. Obviously, if the government could just spy on all of us indescriminently, and without supervision from the other branches of government entrusted with checking one another's powers, then yes, maybe fighting terrorism would be easier. But easier has nothing to do with it. The Bill of Rights exists to protect us from that very issue, from a government exercising too much power over it's citizens the same way that the monarchies the pilrims fled from abused their power. The administration doesn't care that it was violating each American's civil rights, only that having to follow the law made their job a little more difficult. And not only the law, as Judge Taylor pointed out, but also the most sacred of all documents governing the American way of life, the Bill of Rights. This was an obvious violation, as anyone involved realized, and the fact that is has now been rectified is a freat relief to me, as it should be to every other American citizen.