Chris Christie vs. Rand Paul on national security
Two of the big names from the list of likely Republican contenders in 2016 have launched an escalating war of words over libertarianism, privacy rights, and national security. The first strike came from New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, as reported by the New York Times:“This strain of libertarianism that’s going through parties right now and making big headlines I think is a very dangerous thought,” Mr. Christie said on a panel with other Republican governors here.Asked if he was alluding to [Senator Rand] Paul, a potential Republican presidential rival, Mr. Christie spoke in deeply personal terms about the impact of the 2001 terrorist attacks on his state.“You can name any number of people and he’s one of them,” Mr. Christie shot back before referring to the more than 600 New Jersey families who lost relatives in the attacks. “These esoteric, intellectual debates — I want them to come to New Jersey and sit across from the widows and the orphans and have that conversation. And they won’t, because that’s a much tougher conversation to have.”
Christie went even further, before apparently deciding he had gone too far:
Staking out terrain on the hawkish right ahead of a potential White House bid, Mr. Christie, in remarkably stark terms, warned those advocating a crackdown on the surveillance programs — instituted under President George W. Bush and now being carried out under President Obama — that they would regret their positions.“The next attack that comes, that kills thousands of Americans as a result, people are going to be looking back on the people having this intellectual debate and wondering whether they put. …” said Mr. Christie, before cutting himself off.
Christie got a bit of support from another
Republican governor who might get involved in the 2016 presidential
race, Scott Walker of Wisconsin, who said that instead of a grassroots
libertarian uprising against aggressive government surveillance
measures, “I see a few loud and vocal people talking in Washington, and I
don’t think that necessarily reflects where the party is.”
Senator Paul’s people were not amused to hear
him pre-emptively held guilty as an accomplice to the future murder of
thousands of Americans. (Speaking of “looking back” and holding people
accountable for the path to a massive terror strike, what are your
thoughts on the culpability of Bill Clinton and permanent government
fixtures like Jamie Gorelick for the 9/11 attacks, Mr. Christie?) A
Paul adviser started making an off-the-record response… and then decided
to put it on the record, with his name attached. That’s a sure sign of
elevated blood pressure in Washington.
A senior adviser to Mr. Paul initially sought anonymity to criticize Mr. Christie. But Friday morning, the adviser, Doug Stafford, put his comments on the record — and invoked New Jersey’s Bruce Springsteen to add an additional jab at Mr. Christie.“If Governor Christie believes the constitutional rights and the privacy of all Americans is ‘esoteric,’ he either needs a new dictionary, or he needs to talk to more Americans, because a great number of them are concerned about the dramatic overreach of our government in recent years,” Mr. Stafford said. “Defending America and fighting terrorism is the concern of all Americans, especially Senator Paul. But it can and must be done in keeping with our Constitution and while protecting the freedoms that make America exceptional.”Concluded Mr. Stafford: “In the words of the governor’s favorite lyricist, ‘You know that flag flying over the courthouse, Means certain things are set in stone. Who we are, what we’ll do and what we won’t.’”
Senator Paul himself said via Twitter on
Friday morning, “Christie worries about the dangers of freedom. I worry
about the danger of losing that freedom. Spying without warrants is
unconstitutional.”
Contrary to Governor Walker’s dismissal of the
surveillance controversy as a “few loud and vocal people talking in
Washington,” this is a robust and widespread debate about liberty and
privacy versus security, and it crosses partisan lines. The cause of
the heated exchange between Christie and Paul was the Amash-Conyers amendment
to curtail NSA collection of cell-phone metadata, which only failed by 7
votes in the House. It’s true that Republicans were opposed to the
measure overall, while Democrats supported it, but the vote totals were
such that neither party can dismiss either side of the question out of
hand. No matter which side you come down on, you should be able to see
this as a conversation we need to have, and will probably never stop
having, as Information Age technology makes new forms of surveillance
and data mining possible.
Judging by both Congressional votes and polls,
it would seem fair to say that Americans currently favor the security
side of the scales that balance liberty and security. But the concerns
of the other side are not trivial. This particular Administration has
proven itself uniquely untrustworthy with confidential data. President
Obama’s defense against scandal is to describe the problems as systemic
and rooted in the bureaucracy that predated him, and will continue after
his departure. He’s decidedly uninterested in doing anything to resolve the problems, describing them as “phony distractions” from his agenda.
No one should be surprised that a healthy
segment of the Republican Party finds all of this deeply disturbing.
And it would be a mistake to satisfy ourselves with the eventual
departure of a scandal-plagued Administration as the permanent solution
to the problem. Government’s powers should be limited in a way that
preserves the freedom of American citizens even when a bad
Administration is running the show. ”Don’t give the government any
powers that Barack Obama could not be trusted with” is a decent motto
for the libertarian-minded Republican. Conversely, if a program is
truly essential to national security, we should not dismiss it as
rubbish because of who currently sits in the White House.
To put it mildly, it’s unfair and illogical
for Christie to drag the widows and orphans of 9/11 into a debate about
privacy and security in 2013. It doesn’t speak well of his confidence
in the strength of his arguments that he would resort to that. (I speak
as someone generally willing to settle close calls between liberty and
security in favor of security, especially in the era of asymmetrical
warfare, where intelligence about terror threats is of paramount
importance.)
I would also point out that the government did detect
the 9/11 hijackers in a variety of ways, but it willfully chose to
ignore them. The same can be said of the Boston Marathon bombers. All
these dazzling high-tech data mining operations, in which surveillance
data on all Americans is stored forever in mighty terabyte vaults,
doesn’t count for much if the government deliberately chooses to ignore
certain threats, for reasons ranging from ideology to bureaucratic
inertia. The Daily Caller has
a post up today, detailing how the FBI spent years studiously ignoring
“warnings about the radical origins and nature of the mosque frequented
by the Tsarnaev brothers.”
We constantly see stories about how low-tech
traditional sources of intelligence are ignored, even as the government
spends millions on the new high-tech systems it uses for blanket data
harvesting. As I recall one wag observing after reports of Russian
warnings about the Tsarnaev brothers surfaced, our security apparatus
was given a credible warning about a particularly threatening
individual, and the response was “Don’t bother us, we’re busy watching
everybody.”
On the other hand, firm accounts of threats
actually prevented by the programs that have libertarians nervous are
thin. We are told this is because the documentation necessary to tell
those success stories is classified. That response may be defensible,
but it shouldn’t come as a surprise that critics find it unsatisfying.
None of this should be framed, by either side,
as a binary choice between total surveillance and deadly vulnerability.
It does not strike me as a question that can be easily or permanently
settled, so I’m naturally suspicious of those who claim otherwise. But
after all we’ve learned about the government’s abuse of confidential
data in 2013, I can’t help feeling uncomfortable when I see another
gigantic federal data trove piling up, even when I hear decent arguments
for how it can be used to fight terrorists. I can’t stop thinking
about what else it could be used for.
No comments:
Post a Comment