Bush Claims Right to Open Citizen’s Mail without Warrants

If anyone had thought that President George “LBJ” Bush had taken November’s mid-term election results to heart, they were brutally disabused by a December 20 signing statement that came to light yesterday. In an exclusive, New York’s Daily News (which has already scooped the New York Times twice in 2007) reports that the president’s signing statement “provides for opening of an item of a class of mail otherwise sealed against inspection in a manner consistent ... with the need to conduct searches in exigent circumstances.” That’s an exception so broad that an entire division of storm troopers could goosestep through it.

The paper says the “Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act deals with mundane reform measures. But it also explicitly reinforced protections of first-class mail from searches without a court's approval.” The President has decided that he’ll not only snoop on Americans electronically without a warrant, he’ll also ignore the law and the constitution when it comes to searching and seizing mail. Examples he cites “protect human life and safety against hazardous materials and the need for physical searches specifically authorized by law for foreign intelligence collection.”

Given that the Post Office in America delivers mail once a day, and that first-class mail between major cities can take a week, there is no reason for the government to skip the legal procedure of securing a warrant. This is doubly so since the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court provides ex post facto warrants for electronic eavesdropping, and there is no reason to suppose it would deny the same for snail mail.

What is particularly troubling is the exception to “protect human life” from a man who believes that life begins at conception and that the state’s jurisdiction extends to a woman’s womb. Opening the mail of any woman who may be pregnant, opening the mail of any physician with sufficient training to perform an abortion, opening the mail of anyone who may donate to a hospital or clinic that has the capacity to perform such a procedure does not, under this exception, require a warrant. It may seem far-fetched, but so did attacking a country in a search for non-existent weapons of mass destruction.

Yesterday, the Democratic Party took control of both houses of Congress for the first time in a dozen years. The President has continued his “my way or the highway” approach to governance, and it has to stop. If that means two years of political gridlock, let it start today. Doing nothing usually is better than doing the wrong thing.

© Copyright 2007 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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