I see Chuck Schumer is feeling frisky.  The senator was holding up a copy of the United States Constitution this evening as he grilled Supreme Court nominee, Samuel Alito.  Throughout his interrogation of Alito, Schumer questioned, directly and indirectly, if the judge would uphold the Constitution.  My question to the senator would be: What Constitution is he referring to?  The one that I have (that would be the one housed at the National Archives in Washington) says nothing about a general "right to privacy".  Nowhere in the document does it say that an abortion is a "fundamental right".  Nor does the document, as CNN seems to think, stipulate such a thing as a "separation of church and state".  The constitution that I have (and again, that's the one in D.C.) does not allow a government to take a citizen's property to give to another private citizen or entity.  So again, is he referring to the Constitution that I have or the one that the justices of the Supreme Court have, to use a nice term, "made"?

Much has been made about whether the Constitution is "living" or not.  If by "living" one means it can be changed, I agree that it is a "living" document.  The question then becomes who should be the agent of that change, the people or the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court?  By adding rights and changing the meaning of phrases and clauses, the justices have taken the power to amend the constitution away from the people of this country.  If the "supreme law of the land" can now be changed according to the whims and preferences of nine people then is this government we live under "of the people, by the people, and for the people" anymore?  One would have to conclude it is not.              

To say that what the President has done by authorizing warrantless wiretaps by the NSA is a "crime" or "unconstitutional" in my opinion is to define the line in the politics of this war.  In other words, you will deem warrantless wiretaps unconstitutional if you believe a) we are not at war and b) the proper way to combat terrorism is treating terrorists as criminals and not agents of a foreign power that have declared war on the U.S.  If you, however, view the United States as being at war with al Qaeda and other Islamofascists, then the measure Bush has taken is fully within his constitutional authority as commander in chief. 

He is charged with keeping the American people safe from harm; it is his highest duty.  This measure is certainly doing just that.  Consider: 1942, Heinrich Himmler has been making phone calls to the U.S. and FDR is not allowed to direct the OSS to screen those calls?  Most Americans, with the exception of the lunatics, would say that FDR would have the constitutional right to direct the OSS to glean information from those phone calls without consulting Felix Frankfurter or Hugo Black beforehand.  But again, the argument comes back to the original premise: Do you treat the conflict like a war or treat it like a criminal conspiracy to be dealt with by indictments and beholden to the standards of criminal law, i.e. "beyond a reasonable doubt". 

Consider as well the measures to which Abraham Lincoln went with the Emancipation Proclamation.  There is nothing in the Constitution of 1862 that says Lincoln had the authority to free the slaves.  But he did, by using the Emancipation Proclamation as a military measure to help the Union defeat the Confedaracy.  Is not this latest measure by the President intended to help win this war against Islamofascism?