FEDS TO OPEN YOUR MAIL
W pushes envelope on U.S. spying

From the New York Daily News courtesy of AlterNet:

President Bush has quietly claimed sweeping new powers to open Americans' mail without a judge's warrant, the Daily News has learned.

The President asserted his new authority when he signed a postal reform bill into law on Dec. 20. Bush then issued a "signing statement" that declared his right to open people's mail under emergency conditions.

That claim is contrary to existing law and contradicted the bill he had just signed, say experts who have reviewed it.

And

Experts said the new powers could be easily abused and used to vacuum up large amounts of mail.

"The [Bush] signing statement claims authority to open domestic mail without a warrant, and that would be new and quite alarming," said Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies in Washington.

"The danger is they're reading Americans' mail," she said.

"You have to be concerned," agreed a career senior U.S. official who reviewed the legal underpinnings of Bush's claim. "It takes Executive Branch authority beyond anything we've ever known."

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Democratic Congress or Republican Congress, it's full steam ahead for the Bush White House. Of course, this is an absolute outrage, and an unconstitutional violation of privacy at face value, but at the moment, I'm more concerned with the other unconstitutional behavior that this act represents: Bush continues to cut away at the separation of powers between the three branches of the federal government, thereby expanding the Oval Office's powers well beyond anything we've seen since King George III ruled the colonies.

This is yet another, in a series of hundreds, of the President's "signing statements," bullshit White House legalese designed to give some legal cover for Oval Office defiance of Congressional authority. That is, Bush signs virtually every bill that comes across his desk, but while doing it, he often states that his interpretation of the law is such that, in executing it, he'll do the exact opposite of what it says. Group this with all the secrecy, all the domestic spying, all the attacks on his own watch dog agencies, all the appointments of ideological bastards to run regulatory agencies, and on and on, and it's achingly obvious that Bush, or more likely Cheney, is trying to turn the Presidency into some kind of super executive branch, beholden to no law or other branch of government. In other words, a king, or a dictator.

Just because you've got seventy five cable channels and a wide screen TV doesn't mean things aren't going to hell.

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