Excising The Judiciary

What's with all these new laws with clauses "shall not be subject to  
judicial review".  It is like our leaders don't even have the pretense  
of constitutionality anymore.
regards,
-Lance
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Excising The Judiciary
01 FEB 2011 07:44 PM

by Conor Friedersdorf

Senators Lieberman and Collins are teaming up on behalf of a  
disgraceful bill that would give the president unprecedented power  
over the Internet in a national emergency. Or if there wasn't an  
emergency, and the president just wanted to engage in wanton abuses of  
power, it would effectively enable that too, because itprohibits the  
court system from reviewing the decision to declare an emergency:

The revised version includes new language saying that the federal  
government's designation of vital Internet or other computer systems  
"shall not be subject to judicial review." Another addition expanded  
the definition of critical infrastructure to include "provider of  
information technology," and a third authorized the submission of  
"classified" reports on security vulnerabilities.

The idea of creating what some critics have called an Internet "kill  
switch" that the president could flip in an emergency is not exactly  
new. A draft Senate proposal that CNET obtained in August 2009  
authorized the White House to "declare a cybersecurity emergency," and  
another from Sens. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.V.) and Olympia Snowe (R- 
Maine) would have explicitly given the government the power to "order  
the disconnection" of certain networks or Web sites. House Democrats  
have taken a similar approach in their own proposals.

Here's Doug Mataconis on the irony of this bill:

On Friday, the crisis in Egypt seemed to finally come to the attention  
of the West when the Egyptian government decided to completely cut off  
the nation’s connections to the internet... we need to step back and  
think about whether its really a good idea to be giving this kind of  
unchecked power to a President. Not just this President, or the last  
one, but any President. The most important thing to remember about  
grants of power like this is that they almost never get revoked, and  
the typically get expanded on over time.
Hosni Mubarak’s decision to cut off the Internet may have done us a  
huge favor in some respects by bringing this issue to the forefront.  
Do we really want our President to have the power to do something that  
dictators do when faced with citizen unrest? I don’t.

Me neither.

The Founders gave us a system of checks and balances. Pre-emptively  
dismantling it is idiocy. This is the sort of legislation that ought  
to be anathema to the subsets of the right and left that claim to care  
about liberty. Perhaps they can take time away from shouting at the  
Koch brothers and fretting about death panels to kill it?

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