Daschle: Power We Didn’t Grant
THe Chief has stated in an earlier post, words to the effect that he wouldn’t politically trust the former Senator Dachshund Daschle any farther than he could be thrown. His OpEd in the Washington post is worthy of some comment as TD finds himself in a state of high dudgeon about the NSA wiretap controversy. Where to start?
As Senate majority leader at the time, I helped negotiate that law with the White House counsel’s office over two harried days.
Yeah, they were negotiating, and TD provided the harrying.
I can state categorically that the subject of warrantless wiretaps of American citizens never came up.
Why should they have? Both Clinton and Carter signed executive orders authorizing thes already, so the precedent was already on the books, since these had not been rescinded.
I did not and never would have supported giving authority to the president for such wiretaps.
I believe him! He would only think this would be OK for a Donk president to do, not for a Republican.
I am also confident that the 98 senators who voted in favor of authorization of force against al Qaeda did not believe that they were also voting for warrantless domestic surveillance.
WOW! The Chief never knew that Daschle was the spokesman for those 98 Senators! I always thought he represented the Donk senators in his leadership role, and that the GOP had its own Senate leadership. Silly me!
He goes on with more, but I’m going to stop here, before I need even more Bayer than I did after the previous post. The Chief would refer the reader to the Abraham Lincold quotation listed just below the Day-by-Day cartoon strip in this blog.
Sen. Tom, Abe would have had you and your ilk in his mind as latter-day copperheads along with the original ones of his day.