Molly Ivins: Bill of Wrongs

    For nearly two terms in office, Team Bush has been undermining what constitutional conservative scholar Bruce Fein calls the "very architecture of the Constitution." And they've had a pretty good run at it.
    Let's see. we've already destroyed the Fourth Amendment on unreasonable search and seizure.  Has that stopped terrorism cold?  Does Osama Bin Laden quiver in fear because we have crippled the Fifth and Sixth Amendments?
    And the First? Have we defanged Islamist extremists by damaging the First Amendment?  Are we any safer?  Does this strike you as an effective remedy to terrorism?

The words are from the last book of Molly Ivins, cowritten with Lou Dubose.    These are Mollys' words, from her introduction, entitled with the words of Ben Franklin: "A REPUBLIC - IF WE CAN KEEP IT."

Bill of Wrongs: The Executive Branch's Assault on America's Fundamental Rights is a book you SHOULD read.  If you are reading my words, you care about our fundamental rights, as did Ivins.  Let me illustrate.
Let me start at the end, from the conclusion, which acknowledges that Ivins left the project at the end of January 2007, when she finally succumbed to her cancer.  In that sense, the words I now quote are those of Dubose, although clearly informed by the spirit of Ivins:

The principled women and angry men who stand up to the bullies, bastards, and ideologues who have hijacked our government and came dangerously close to destroying a document created by colonial subjects resolved to re-create themselves as citizens of a constitutional democracy.
    The fight ain't over.  But it's the courage and intelligence of the men and women we encountered while working on this book, and the courage and skill of the lawyer who went to court with them, that limited the damage George W. Bush has done to our Constitution since he took the oath of office in January 2001.  (Our reporting has disabused of of the common notion that the current programmatic assault on our constitutionally guaranteed civil liberties began only after the the terrorist attacks of September 2001)

The book covers a wealth of material in a few chapters, only 8 in less than 200 pages.  The first chapter is especially appropriate as I write this on the night of July Fourth.  Entitled "Independence Day" it begins with what happened in West Virginia in 2004 when a couple showed up on the grounds of the state capital where Bush was to speak wearing t-shirts with the international symbol for 'No"- a circle with a slash through it - imposed over the four letters of the name of the president. This is but one example cited of people arrested, their jobs threatened, and the like.  And in the case of the couple with the t-shirts?  

Three years after an arrest team dragged Jeff and Nicole Rank away from their president's July 4 speech, the federal government settled.  In August 2007 the government paid the ranks $80,000 in damages while admitting no wrongdoing.  They didn't have to.

What is scary is that sometimes the government gets away with it.  In the next chapter Ivins and Dubose tell several tales, one of a man named Brett Bursey, who had a history of protests, and having previously won a case, believed he had the right to protest.  He was tried under an obscure Federal statute first passed but not used near the end of of Nixon's second term.  The prosecution was brought by US Attorney Strom Thurmond Jr in the friendly venue of the District Court in South Carolina, and Bursey was convicted of a misdemeanor, a charge upheld in the 4th Circuit.  His lawyer, Lewis Pitts, is quoted in this next extract:  

When the U S. Supreme Court refused to hear the case, as Pitts sees it, Karl Rove and Attorney General John Ashcroft achieved their objective.  They gamed the legal system and won an appellate court review of a draconian law that would silence dissent wherever the president traveled. They have a license to arrest anyone carrying a sign or wearing a T-shirt authorities find offensive and to corral dissidents in small redoubts where they are free to exercise their First Amendment rights.

In December, 2005, Senator Arlen Specter made a technical adjustment to the revised USA Patriot Act.  The provision the moderate Republican from Pennsylvania inserted with no debate seems to render moot the federal misdemeanor charge for which Brett Bursey was prosecuted. Henceforth, anyone caught in a restricted zone will now be subject to felony charges under the Patriot Act, punishable by one year in jail and a fine.  "Restricted zones" will include National Special security events - such as the Olympics, the Supre Bowl, and any one of the President Ronald Reagan's many funerals.  The zones - themselves designated as protectees - can be shut down for days before and after the president's scheduled arrival.

I do not want this diary to be too long.  My only purpose is to STRONGLY urge you to buy the book, to read it, and pass it on to others, perhaps to insist, before they vote on the FISA reauthorization, that your US Senators read it.  It covers many events we should know well - the trial of Intelligent design in the Dover PA ISD;  Brandon Mayfield; and others.

So let me just whet your appetite with a few more quotes, to give a sense of the book and its language.

It was Governor Ma Ferguson who settled a dispute about foreign language teaching in public schools by pointing to her King James Bible and saying, "I English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it's good enough for the schoolchildren of Texas."

Founded by former Reagan White House official Bruce Chapman, Discovery got $1.5 million in startup funding from Howard Ahmanson.  Ahmanson, heir to a California savings and loan fortune, also invested in Christian Reconstructionist groups advancing the teachings of the late Rousas J. Rushdoony, whose theology is so toxic that even the most batshit  American evangelicals disavow him. (The execution of adulterers, homosexuals, witches, and incorrigible children can be a hard sell.)

In writing about the sneak and peek provisions used by the FBI against Brandon Mayfield, Ivins and Dubose refer us to John Adams, who as a young man watch the older James Otis argue against the British use of Writs of Assistance:

John Adams was a young country lawyer from down the pike in Braintree.  "Otis was a flame on Fire!" Adams wrote years later.  Flame or not, he lost his case.  Yet Adams later wrote the the fight against writs of assistance was the "commencement of the controversy between Great Britain and America."

Two more quick quotes from the chapter on Brandon Mayfield, an episode that eventually required the US to pay him $2 million.

    Mayfield wasn't the only one to get the finger.
    Back in Madrid, the Spanish National Police had done their own analysis and reached their won conclusion.  Twenty-six days before two FBI agenst walked into Brandon Mayfield's law office, cuffed him, and took him to jail, the Spaniards informed the FBI there was "no match."  The FBI promptly dispatched an agent (who did not speak Spanish) to Madrid to convince the Spanish National Police that they were wrong.  The Spaniards sood by their analysis.

The FBI continued to insist that the print was of Mayfield's index finger, until the Spanish arrested an Algerian whose fingerprint matched the print in question.  

It turned out that the print was not even an index finger, although the FBI match described as a 100 percent match of Mayfield's right index.

Ivins and Dubose also provide a brief history of habeas corpus, including its denial in a case in Ipswich, MA, where the judge told the accused (who were convicted) that they should not think that they had the protection of the laws of England wherever they went (and I am sure this was included because of the administration's claims about Guantanamo):  

     This sort of high-handed behavior was on the minds of the framers of the Constitution when they met in 1787 in Philadelphia, where there was something of a habeas corpus feeding frenzy.  Charles Pinckney proposed a near absolute right that the Congress could suspend only under the most "urgent and pressing occasion" and then only for a fixed time.  Another South Carolinian, John  Rutledge, argued the right should never be suspended.  James Wilson of Pennsylvania argued that suspension should never be necessary, and that any power to deny a writ of habeas corpus should rest with judges, who would decide on  case-by-case basis, not the Congress or the president ordering wholesale suspension.
    Thomas Jefferson wrote home from his diplomatic posting in Paris, warning James Madison about insufficient attention to "the eternal unremitting force of the habeas corpus laws. and trials by jury."  The right to habeas corpus was included in Article I of the Constitution, then reinforced in the Bill of Rights, by amendments that provide for a speedy public trial and prohibit excessive bail as well as cruel and unusual punishment.

And consider this:

Though the Treasury Department is authorized to designate a group or person as a "global terrorist," there is no legal definition of that term.  Nor is there any established procedure to get off the list.

the program is believed to intercept 3 billion communications per day: phone calls, Internet, e-mails, faxes, telexes, microwave permutations of words, phrases, pictures, voices, address, phone numbers.
    That's what the Bush administration turned on the American people, without going before the FISA court to get warrants.

A lawyer who is involved in one of the cases against the administration, one case where there is specific evidence that the communications of his clients were improperly intercepted by the government without the proper warrants, informed the judge hearing the case of

a specific passage in FISA:  "An aggrieved person who has been subject to electronic surveillance in violation of FISA shall have a cause of action against any person who committed such a violation."

I want to end by quoting from the acknowledgments, written by Lou Dubose, because Ivins passed away before the book could be completed:  

This book was Molly's project, the Bill of Rights her great love, writing her life's mission.  We worked together pitching the book to Random House, and then shaping, reporting, and revising chapters.  Molly wasn't inclined to let go.  Not even when I returned from New Jersey to find her in Seton Hospital in Austin, less than a week before she returned to her South Austin home to die.  From her hospital bed, in a voice so soft it was almost inaudible, she explained how we could best tell the story of the Bush administration's program to quash the First Amendment free-speech rights of American citizens who dared to criticize the president.  This was what she cared about.  Her determination to stay in the game was remarkable.

In a few weeks, more than a thousand of us will gather in Austin, but somehow I will feel cheated, because we will not have Molly Ivins to address us.  I know she would have jumped at the chance, to remind us what the Constitution and especially the Bill of Rights are supposed to mean.

I ask that you honor her memory by reading this book, and encouraging others to do likewise.

Peace.

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