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Congress reveals its double standard

by Darren Allen
May 28, 2006

Members of Congress last week finally decided that invasion of privacy and the president's overstepping his power are matters of grave importance.

And it took an FBI raid of the office of one of their own to get them all worked up.

As The Washington Post first reported, FBI agents obtained a warrant to search the offices of Rep. William Jefferson, a long-time New Orleans Democrat after they secretly taped him accepting $100,000, ostensibly to help a company win Internet contracts in Africa.

Never mind that this time the FBI obtained a search warrant unlike, say, the CIA or the NSA in their attempts to listen in on Americans' private phone conversations.

Democrats and Republicans alike called on the FBI to return the documents seized from Jefferson's office, saying along the way that it represented an extraordinary overreaching of power on the part of the executive branch.

"No person is above the law, neither the one being investigated nor those conducting the investigation," said a letter signed by both House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. "The Justice Department must immediately return the papers it unconstitutionally seized. Once that is done, Congressman Jefferson can and should fully cooperate with the Justice Department's efforts, consistent with his constitutional rights."

It was apparently the first time in Congress' history that a member's office had been raided by the Justice Department. Of course, as The Washington Post explained in an editorial, "this was no fishing expedition."

It's great that there is bipartisan anger at law enforcement officials executing a lawfully obtained search warrant against someone suspected of wrongdoing. That should play well here in the rest of America.

Vermonters are no strangers to outrage over invasions of privacy on the part of our congressional delegation. Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., has been one of the most vocal critics of the recently disclosed collection of millions of phone records by the country's top spy agency. Rep. Bernard Sanders, I-Vt., has been one of the loudest opponents of the Patriot Act and provisions that allow government snooping into our library borrowing habits.

Heck, a former member of Congress who couldn't disagree more with Sanders' socialist leanings, came to the state a few weeks ago to decry the ever-encroaching nature of the current president's administration.

"I can't understand that while you have a president thumbing his nose at Congress and the country and expressing disdain for the Constitution that Congress just sits there and takes it," former Rep. Bob Barr, a Republican from Georgia, said during his visit here. "How is it that one individual can take power from the people and not be held accountable?"

How is it, indeed? On the one hand, Congress seems to just sit by and do nothing more than express frustration when the executive branch is reaching its tentacles into the private lives of the people from whom it derives its powers.

But if one of their own – no matter what party or what wrongdoing is suspected – is the recipient of a little intrusion from the executive branch, well, then, something must be done.

Vermonters are proud of their government's relative absence from our lives and about its strong protection of individual liberties. Recall that when the latest phone-records scandal broke, calls for an immediate investigation of the state's largest telephone company were swift and bipartisan.

I suspect, however, that Vermonters and other Americans will look at Pelosi and Hastert and Jefferson with more than a little skepticism.

It's one thing for the crew of insiders to act like they've somehow been wronged by what looks like, from all accounts, a perfectly lawful and reasonable search of a crime suspect's office, a suspect whom authorities say didn't cooperate with them for months.

It's quite another for them to expect that we will share their outrage.

After all, they certainly don't seem to share ours when it is our privacy that is being violated.

Darren Allen writes weekly about Vermont issues, people and events. You can reach him at [e-mail].

© 2006 Rutland Herald

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