Why the U.S. Executive Branch Is a Clear and Present Danger to Our Democracy

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The notion that Executive power is subject to meaningful judicial review is another fiction. The FISA court  rubber-stamped 1,788 out of 1,788 applications for wiretapping, allowed by the Executive only to rule on the processes it claimed to follow not the actual people being wiretapped. And, even more disturbing, the N.Y. Times  has revealed that the 11-member secret FISA court, including 10 conservative Republicans appointed by John Roberts, has become an antidemocratic Star Chamber that has not only failed to limit but actually expanded Executive Power to spy on us.

Adjudicating a case in which the ACLU sued to obtain illegal Executive "kill lists," federal judge Colleen McMahon  wrote, "I find no way around the thicket of laws and precedents that effectively allow the Executive Branch of our Government to proclaim as perfectly lawful certain actions that seem on their face incompatible with our Constitution and laws, while keeping the reasons for their conclusion a secret." The Patriot Act was specifically  designed to preclude meaningful judicial review .

And the U.S. mass media, although some journalists have done important work revealing Executive wrongdoing, primarily serves to convey Executive "talking points" to the public on an hourly basis.

The media dutifully  broadcast around the nation former FBI agent and current House Intelligence Chair Mike Rogers' unproven  claim that Edward Snowden is a traitor because of "changes we can already see being made by the folks who wish to do us harm." The media then reported that Senate Intelligence Committee member Saxby Chambliss  said that "the bad guys are now changing their methods of operation." Then, after we were told that this program would help the enemy if revealed, anonymous NSA officials were suddenly made available to discuss it with the  Washington Post , Reuters, CNN, and the AP, which  ran a story headlined "Al-Qaida Said To Be Changing Its Ways After Leaks" that appeared in newspapers around America.

The charge was hardly credible since the NSA provided no evidence to support its claim, Snowden had a strong self-interest in not providing details which could have helped his prosecution for espionage, and the unnamed "folks who wish to do us harm" have long known their emails and phone calls were monitored. But the Executive Branch had succeeded in its goal of using the mass media to bombard the American people with these messages to support its indicting him as a spy.

Authoritarian secrecy and deception is the beating heart of Executive power. Former Obama administration official Ronan Farrow, who had a top-secret clearance, has  reported that "trillions of new pages of text are classified each year," and that "a government agency was found to be classifying the equivalent of 20 million filing cabinets filled with text." It is obvious that almost none of this would be of use to "Muslim terrorists," and that the Executive's main goal is to keep information of its abuses and mismanagement from reaching taxpayers, which might threaten its funding. When the Justice Department indicted whistleblower  Thomas Drake for espionage, after he had futilely gone through proper internal channels to try and correct serious NSA mismanagement, the Executive’s goal was clearly not "to protect national security" but to keep the evidence of its incompetence from reaching American taxpayers.

Eisenhower and the Myth of Presidential Control Over the Executive Branch

Although those who suggest the U.S. Executive Branch is subverting democracy are often maligned as radicals, alarmists, unpatriotic, or worse, it was one of America's most respected generals and popular presidents who first brought this issue to public attention 52 years ago. On January 17, 1961, Dwight David Eisenhower famously  warned that the "conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence by the military industrial complex. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes."