Greenwald goes into more detail than I care to, but the bottom line is that a Federal Appeals court voted 2-1 to throw out an ACLU case against the administration for violating FISA because the ACLU couldn’t prove they had standing.
The logic? If you can’t show you have been injured, you have no standing to sue. So…the government can secretly listen in on your phone calls without a a warrant or any judicial review. Since you can’t prove they are listening in on your phone calls, you can’t get a court to let you bring a case and compel witnesses and evidence. End result? The government can do whatever they want unless a whistleblower comes forward and names specific injured parties.
Nevertheless, the court did not rule the administration’s actions legal. In fact, the dissenting judge specifically said otherwise.
The closest question in this case, in my opinion, is whether the plaintiffs have the standing to sue. Once past that hurdle, however, the rest gets progressively easier…[The administration’s] AUMF and inherent-authority arguments are weak in light of existing precedent and statutory construction.
The AUMF is the Authority to Use Military Force that the Congress gave the president after 9/11. The courts have rejected the argument that the AUMF or Article II of the Constitution give the president the authority to violate the law. But, they have also ruled that we can’t do a damn thing about it unless we can prove specific injury to ourselves.
The erosion of our rights continues.
