As a result of his service in the War Crimes trials following WWII no American jurist was more familiar with the abuses imposed upon the citizenry by arbitrary totalitarian government than was Mr. Justice Robert H. Jackson. Shortly after he resumed his seat on the U.S Supreme Court following his assignment as the U.S. Prosecutor in the Nuremberg trials he wrote the following:

"These [Fourth Amendment rights], I protest, are not mere second-class rights but belong in the catalog of indispensable freedoms. Among deprivations of rights, none is so effective in cowing a population, crushing the spirit of the individual and putting terror in every heart. Uncontrolled search and seizure is one of the first and most effective weapons in the arsenal of every arbitrary government." Brinegar v. United States, 338 U.S. 160, 180 (Jackson, J., dissenting). (quoted with approval in Almeida-Sanchez v. United States, 413 U.S. 266, 1973).

No more eloquent rebuttal to the President claim to unrestricted arbitrary power can be found than the burden of Justice Jackson’s words. No more direct political indictment of the President’s act in directing warrantless interceptions of the personal communications of Americans can be drafted. The concept enunciated by the President and his Attorney General is alien to the American conception of liberty and violates every principal of our Constitutional structure of limited governmental power. The proposition that any public officer may abrogate the Bill of Rights whether in time of peace or in time of war is, as Justice Jackson wrote, anathema to American freedom; it is evidence that the President and his Administration have come to regard our sacred compact between the People and their government as “just a goddamned scrap of paper” to be ignored and disregarded at will.

We are told not to be concerned because that extra-Constitutional power has only been exercised against persons who have been identified by the President as terrorist sympathizers. At the same time that those reassurances are being offered The President, the Vice President and their unreasoning supporters are accusing each American, no matter of what station or degree, who questions or criticizes the Presidents conduct of his war of being a defeatist giving comfort and support to the terrorist enemies of the State.

Today Vice-President Cheney applauded the President’s action saying that it was restoring “the luster” of the Presidency lost in the era of Vietnam and Watergate. Those comments gave us a crystal clear insight into the intention of this Administration to impose to the greatest extent possible arbitrary executive power upon the People of the United States and, by extension, upon all the people of the world.

For any patriot the luster of the Presidency lies not in its exercise of extra-Constitutional powers but rather in the scrupulous adherence to the limitations and proscriptions of our sacred scrap of paper.