Experts: NSA Lawsuit Could Break New Legal Ground
“If this [NSA phone surveillance] came up to the Supreme Court with this Supreme Court, they would declare it unconstitutional,” Laura Murphy, director of the ACLU’s Washington legislative office, said Thursday at an event hosted by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who is considering signing on to the group’s suit.
So if the ACLU wins the SCOUTS case, these guys, among others, will be on the winning side of the arguement i.e. go down in history as “the good guys”:
plus at least 23 other Democratic US Senators as of 5 July
And these guys will be, among others, the losers of the arguments i.e. the “bad guys”:
Some outside experts are less certain. Geoffrey Stone, a University of Chicago law professor who worked at the school with President Barack Obama, said the ACLU’s position is “reasonable,” but he doesn’t see the court issuing a ruling that shuts down the phone surveillance program.
And based strictly on existing Supreme Court case law, says George Washington University law professor Orin Kerr, the group’s arguments are “weak.”
And if Obama wins the ACLU case this is what will be part of his legacy:
[hat tip to HSG - “thanks”]
But Paul Rosenzweig, a former deputy assistant secretary for policy in the Bush-era Department of Homeland Security, pointed to another pending case that changed shape after a recent Justice Department admission. “On drones, official people from the president on down spoke about the program and the courts still didn’t hear the case, saying the program was still a state secret,” he said.
And
And this time around, says Kerr, “the ACLU’s goal is probably to get discovery” — to force the government to declassify more information about the programs — “not to win.”
More: Experts: NSA Lawsuit Could Break New Legal Ground - Jennifer Epstein
So the best scenario is that the Fed Govt wins the case by claiming it is a “state secret”, but we will all know more about it and then it continues as a Fed Govt Program akin to Targeted Drone Killings but with a legal status that allows it to involve more US Citizens now on US soil.
Ironic that a man elected as the first African Amercian president, who wrote a book about hope and change and a fomer Constitutional law professor associated himself with some of the most dispicable figures in recent US political history and left in place, two of the most agregious affronts to civil rights perpetrated in the last 50 years.