From the Center for Individual Freedom:
U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor is the first judge in our nation's history with the audacity to tell the President of the United States to stop gathering intelligence from a foreign enemy during wartime.
It's pure insanity!
Five years after 9-11, politicians are still discussing whether it's okay to gather intelligence by monitoring phone calls that known and suspected terrorists make to the United States!
But as far as Judge Anna Diggs Taylor is concerned -- THERE IS NO DISCUSSION!
And you can bet that terrorists in Iran and Syria were dancing in the streets when they heard the news.
But to make matters worse, Judge Anna Diggs Taylor issued this ruling knowing full well that since 9-11, our intelligence agencies, in cooperation with Britain, have thwarted major plots to commit unspeakable atrocities:
One captured plotter planned to detonate a "dirty bomb" -- a conventional explosive device filled with radioactive materials. His target: New York City.Just a couple of weeks ago, British intelligence uncovered a plot to blow up as many as 10 airliners over the Atlantic Ocean and in the process kill thousands of people en route to the U.S.
That information was obtained by intercepting phone calls of known and suspected terrorists. And what U.S. and British intelligence agencies did -- Judge Anna Diggs Taylor would outlaw.
Judge Anna Diggs Taylor's opinion is so poorly argued and so badly written that it makes no sense whatsoever. Even the Washington Post -- a newspaper with an obvious liberal, anti-Bush editorial policy -- couldn't bring itself to endorse Judge Anna Diggs Taylor's legal tantrum:
"[T]he decision yesterday by a federal district court in Detroit, striking down the NSA's program, is neither careful nor scholarly, and it is hard-hitting only in the sense that a bludgeon is hard-hitting. The angry rhetoric of U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor will no doubt grab headlines. But as a piece of judicial work -- that is, as a guide to what the law requires and how it either restrains or permits the NSA's program -- her opinion will not be helpful..."
Law Professor Eugene Volokh wrote:
"[T]he judge's opinion in today's NSA eavesdropping case seems not just ill-reasoned, but rhetorically ill-conceived."
And Brian Cunningham, former deputy legal adviser to NSA, said:
"[W]e cannot accept the stunningly amateurish piece of, I hesitate even to call it legal work, by which she purports to make our government go deaf and dumb to those [that] would murder us en masse... I wouldn't accept this utterly unsupported, constitutionally and logically bankrupt collection of musings from a first-year law student, much less a new lawyer at my firm."
Question: Just how did Anna Diggs Taylor get on the federal bench?Answer: Jimmy Carter appointed her.
It's no coincidence that Carter is now running around the world, denouncing his own country as the greatest threat to world peace, while back home his appointee is undermining our ability to survive as a nation.And it probably didn't hurt to be the ex-spouse of Left-wing Congressman Charles Diggs.
Charles Diggs -- by the way -- resigned from Congress in disgrace in 1980, two years after being convicted of 29 counts of operating a payroll kickback scheme in his office .
By the way, do you know the names of the organizations that "judge-shopped" and "hand-picked" Judge Anna Diggs Taylor -- to hear this case?
Just who are these Liberal groups willing to risk countless American lives in order to embarrass the President before the November elections?
You know them:
The American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU Foundation, and the ACLU of Michigan;Greenpeace (You'd think they'd be anti-terrorist, after the pollution following 9-11.);And -- are you ready for this? -- The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR).
Of course the major media neglected to tell you the identities of the parties to this case -- preferring to say things like, "the ACLU and other not-for-profit organizations."
Speaking of the ACLU, news surfaced following the ruling that Judge Anna Diggs Taylor may have been conflicted in this case to begin with.
You see, according to Judicial Watch, a government watchdog group, Judge Anna Diggs Taylor serves as a secretary and trustee for a foundation that donated $45,000.00 to the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan. As stated above, the ACLU of Michigan was a plaintiff in the case.
As reported by CNSNews.com, "According to her 2003 and 2004 financial disclosure statements, Judge Taylor served as secretary and trustee for the Community Foundation for Southeastern Michigan (CFSEM) and was reelected to the position in June 2005. The official CFSEM website says the foundation made a 'recent grant' of $45,000 to the ACLU of Michigan, a plaintiff in the wiretapping case."
And, here's what The New York Times editorial page -- another bastion of Liberalism and anti-Bush slant -- had to say this week about the possible conflict:
"'When Judge Anna Diggs Taylor was given the job of deciding whether the Bush administration's wiretapping program was unconstitutional, she certainly understood that she would be ruling on one of the most politically charged cases in recent history. So it would have been prudent for her to disclose any activity that might conceivably raise questions about her ability to be impartial. Regrettably, it was left to a conservative group, Judicial Watch, to point out her role as a trustee to a foundation that had given grants to a branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, a plaintiff in the case.' Judge Taylor's 'role at a grant-making foundation whose list of beneficiaries includes groups that regularly litigate in the courts is... disquieting...'"
It appears that Judge Anna Diggs Taylor was influenced more by political bias than the rule of law in ruling the intelligence program unconstitutional. And, her willingness to use her judicial seat to make a political statement and put the lives of all Americans at risk by ruling for a plaintiff that she supports financially is disgraceful.
What prompted this contemptuous dismissal of Judge Anna Diggs Taylor's 43-page diatribe by legal writers and scholars?Here are three examples of her careless misrepresentations of the law.
In her opinion, Judge Taylor quotes extensively from a ruling in Zweibon v. Mitchell , even though the opinion she cites doesn't even address the same issue. She fails to note that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review -- the court established to oversee such matters -- states: in unambiguous language: "[A]ll... courts to have decided the issue, held the President did have inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches to obtain foreign intelligence information."
Let's read that again: "[A]ll... courts to have decided the issue, held the President did have inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches to obtain foreign intelligence information."
She also cites Justice Robert Jackson in Youngstown Sheet and Tube as an important precedent.
But wait a minute! She omits that portion of Justice Jackson's opinion in which he cautions that what he says applies ONLY to domestic cases.
In fact, courts since then have consistently ruled that the President HAS the power to collect foreign intelligence and neither Congress nor any court has the right to interfere.In U.S. v. Curtiss-Wright Export (1936), the Supreme Court of the United States affirmed the "...exclusive power of the President as the sole organ of the federal government in the field of international relations -- a power which does not require as a basis for its exercise an act of Congress..." In over 150 subsequent cases, that opinion has been cited.
Actually, the judge's befuddled ruling would give foreign terrorists more rights -- under the Fourth Amendment -- than average American street criminals.
In 1968, the Warren Court, in Terry v. Ohio, softened the probable cause standard for police street frisks to reasonable suspicion.
In other words... the average policeman can rely on a concept as simple as suspicion to perform a "warrantless search."
Isn't it time to stop partisan judges from opening the doors for Islamic terrorists?
What Exactly Is Stopping Congress?
Probably the two biggest stumbling blocks to the passage of such legislation are (1) the pathological hatred that liberals feel toward President Bush and (2) the spinelessness of our so-called conservative leaders.
The liberals are crazed with Bush phobia. Lurching leftward, driven by hatred, they want to destroy him.
And we suspect that unconsciously many are so consumed with hatred that they honestly do not see that more terrorist attacks will be the natural consequences of their actions.
If Bill Clinton were in the White House, they would behave quite differently -- as indeed they did when Clinton sent troops to Eastern Europe. During World War II, the Roosevelt Administration suspended scores of civil liberties -- something the Bush administration has not done.
But now, in the middle of a dangerous War on Terror, liberals are so hell-bent on defeating the president, they are willing to compromise every single anti-terror tool that makes this country safer.
On the other hand, it would seem that conservative leaders are afraid of their own shadows and are all too willing to let liberals get away with it.
They have refused to dig in their heels and fix their bayonets.Now is the time to put a little steel in their backbones. Our very lives are at stake.
Isn't time to shut the mouths of the ideologues -- and the mouths of Teddy Kennedy, John Kerry, John Murtha, and all the other liberals on Capitol Hill who are willing to sell out their country in their quest for more political power?
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