Liberals and Conservatives, Unite Over the NSA Scandal!
Oh, what a difference a couple centuries make. While Benjamin Franklin famously warned, “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety,” President Obama – with his hand caught in your information cookie jar – now assures us that Franklin had it all wrong: “[O]ne of the things that we’re going to have to discuss and debate is how are we striking this balance between the need to keep the American people safe and our concerns about privacy,” he said, “because there are some tradeoffs involved.”
Yikes.
“The president is conducting an all-out assault on the constitutionally protected rights of American citizens,” responded Mat Staver, founder and chairman of Liberty Counsel, one of the fastest-growing civil rights legal organizations in America.
Electronic data collection on this massive scale clearly violates the Fourth Amendment. It is tantamount to having a government official sneak into your home or business and copy all of your papers, records and personal effects. The fact the government may not immediately use copied material except when it needs it is irrelevant. The Fourth Amendment does not prohibit searches and seizures without probable cause only if the government uses the information,
he said.
We cannot justify such massive collection of American citizens’ data by any government agency under the guise of preventing crime or even terrorism. This government overreach is an indictment on both political parties, as both have been involved in authorizing these unconstitutional acts. Our government leaders and bureaucrats have forgotten the price of liberty and are too willing to give up liberty for a little security,
concluded Staver.
This isn’t a left or right issue. This is about freedom. This is about the rule of law. Barack Obama has exposed himself as an enemy of the Constitution, an enemy of the American people – all of the American people – whether liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican.
Liberals, let’s agree to disagree where we disagree. Likewise, let’s agree to agree where we agree.
Let’s come together and do something about America’s Barack Obama problem.
Image: Flickr; author: Mike DelGaudio; Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license
