Return of the all-seeing eye?

In the memoir of a short and unhappy tenure as secretary of the Treasury in the George W. Bush Administration, Paul O’Neill wrote about a White House scene in the aftermath of the 2002 mid-term elections, where Republicans recaptured control of the Senate and made gains in the House of Representatives.

In his first year in office, President Bush had already pushed a trillion dollars worth of tax cuts through Congress. O’Neill thought that was plenty. Worried about the cost of preserving Social Security, not to mention the expensive war on terror and a ballooning budget deficit, O’Neill argued against further tax cuts during a post-election West Wing meeting. But Vice President Dick Cheney stopped him short. “We won the mid-term elections, this is our due,” Cheney said.

Soon after, O’Neill was forced out. The tax cut stayed.

No matter what you may think of his economic policy, you can’t fault the vice president’s political analysis. When voters live through two years of a party’s time in power and vote for them to return, it is logical for the re-elected party to conclude they now possess a mandate to continue on the course they have already set.

So, if Bush-Cheney win this November, what will they see as their “due” for the next four years? In the arena of civil liberties, a second Bush term could see radical changes in the way law enforcement and the judiciary approach the Bill of Rights.

If a second-term President Bush sees re-election as a mandate to continue his pursuit of aggressive domestic anti-terrorism legislation, expect to see a resurrected “Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003,” also known as Patriot Act II. If you are concerned about the privacy-smashing aspect of the original Patriot Act — and you should be — then the sweeping sequel drafted last year by Bush’s Department of Justice will scare the socks off of you.

Here’s the 1984-esque laundry list: Patriot Act II would allow more police spying on religious and political groups. It would approve secret surveillance and searches of individuals without any showing of connection to a foreign government or terrorist group. It would give the government secret access to credit reports without a person’s consent and without any judicial process.
Patriot Act II would shelter federal agents from prosecution even if they were engaged in illegal surveillance, but provide for criminal penalties for ordinary businesses that resist warrantless orders to provide a customer’s personal records to the feds. Immigrants, even lawful permanent residents, could be secretly arrested and even summarily deported without any evidence of criminal activity.

In fact, the proposed bill expands on several fronts the original Patriot Act’s most striking flaw, allowing a wide range of spying activities by the executive branch of the federal government to go on without any judicial oversight. Patriot Act II has been put on the legislative shelf during this election year, but a re-elected Bush — especially in the wake of any further terror attacks — may well dust it off and reintroduce it.

A TIPS-y second term

A second Bush term may also lead to the resurrection of Attorney General John Ashcroft’s Operation TIPS — the Terrorism Information and Prevention System. Operation TIPS, as you may recall, was a 2002 scheme to imitate the worst aspects of the USSR’s KGB and East Germany’s Stasi by signing up millions of Americans as freelance spies. A Bush Administration Citizens Corps Web site was set up to recruit letter carriers, meter readers, cable technicians, etc. to spy on their neighbors and customers.

A similarly frightening Bush proposal was to be led by retired Adm. John Poindexter, a Reagan Administration official who was convicted of five felony counts of lying to Congress about the Iran-Contra affair. Reincarnated as head of the Bush Pentagon’s Office of Information Awareness, Poindexter designed a Total Information Awareness (TIA) system that would allow the Pentagon access to citizens’ telephone records, financial information, credit card histories and medical histories.

After widespread criticism, Bush backed away from these Orwellian plans. The Operation TIPS Web site disappeared, Poindexter resigned and the TIA program, along with its official symbol, the all-seeing eye depicted on the U.S. dollar bill, faded away.

For now, President Bush obviously liked these ideas before, so who knows what an emboldened second-term president will pursue?

And who will rule on whether these types of programs are constitutional? A re-elected President Bush will have the chance to shape the federal judiciary to conform to his own philosophy of jurisprudence, a philosophy reflected in his stated preference for his two favorite Supreme Court justices, Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia. Bush has already appointed nearly 200 federal judges, so his anti-abortion, anti-labor and anti-affirmative action views are reflected in lifetime appointments on benches around the country.

As for the Supreme Court, it is tricky business making predictions about how a president’s appointments may change the face of American law. Some justices nominated by Republican presidents, including the legendary Eisenhower appointees Earl Warren and William Brennan, went on to become some of the most liberal justices in recent U.S. history. Two of the court’s current moderates, Justice John Paul Stevens (Nixon) and Justice David Souter (Bush I), were Republican appointees.

But it is impossible to ignore the advanced age of several current Supreme Court justices and the fact that two of the oldest justices — 84-year-old Stevens and 74-year-old Sandra Day O’Connor — are the part of the six-vote majority upholding Roe vs. Wade. Affirmative action in higher education is now upheld by a single vote. Any new appointees by Bush, who has worked hard to funnel federal money to religious groups, would be unlikely to vigorously defend the separation of church and state.

If Bush wins another tem, what he and Vice President Cheney see as their post-election “due” could change the Bill of Rights for a generation.