Perhaps intelligence committee is a misnomer

The Constitution of The United States of America is a self-executing document. It does not need permission to grant you your rights, nor does it require a magical incantation to appear and shield you with its protections, as if it were a concoction of a fantasy universe created by a now-very-wealthy female author from England.

But people – many people – with purported intelligence and advanced degrees and those who are presumed to have a basic understanding of these simple facts continue, yet again, to exhibit why we are electing a Congress of fools.

Lawmakers in our nation’s capital – albeit mostly ones with an R next to their name – have made an abrupt about face when it comes to the inviolability of the Constitutional guarantees and have now subjected the rights to a matter of convenience.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R., Mich.) said in an interview Thursday. “We have a long-standing tradition that the judiciary does not interfere with investigations. This sets a very dangerous precedent.”

The “this” that he is referring to, is the story that a Magistrate Judge, on Monday, advised Dzhokhar Tsarnaev of his Privilege Against Self-Incrimination at his arraignment [PDF]. We will get to Mike Rogers, who went on to make even more dangerous comments, in a minute. But first some background.

Apparently, the entire Federal Law Enforcement PolitBuro was “surprised” when a “judge and a US attorney” entered the interrogation room. By then, 16 hours had passed, and any semblance of legitimacy for the use of the “public safety exception” in Quarles. The danger of their “surprise” is that law enforcement expected to be able to “interrogate” Tsarnaev indefinitely/longer/for however long they wanted. Because the Constitution explicitly states that these Rightf are Not Enforceable Until At Leaft 48 Hourf Have Paffed And Thou Art Not A Muflim Terrorift. Wait, no it doesn’t? As my buddy Scott Greenfield writes (linked above):

If this is about the public safety exception, than the government has taken a quantum leap into the temporal abyss. But it’s not clear that this has anything to do with the public safety exception, as it’s hard to imagine anyone arguing with a straight face that they needed five hours, ten, 16, more, to find out whether this 19 year old kid, this kid who had been shot, this kid who (for all he knew) was about to disappear in some black hole the government reserves for terrorists, knew anything about another imminent attack.

Indeed one need only look to this compilation of the changing information of the dangerousness of the two Tsarnaevs to realize that law enforcement’s state goal of “public safety’ was nothing more than an excuse for extraction of information from a U.S. citizen in an extra-judicial manner.

But Rep. Rogers, a former FBI agent, apparently has no such concerns because he’s white not a Muslim.

“What I find shocking is that the judiciary proactively inserted itself into this circumstance and the Justice Department so readily acquiesced to the circumstance,” he said. “The court doing this proactively, they may have jeopardized our ability to get public-safety information.”

A sitting United States Congressman has just stated that the judiciary should not interfere with the administration of law and our rights and that determination of those rights depends entirely on the goodwill of law enforcement agents.

If this were the McCarthy era, or 1984, and I had to give up people I suspected as Communist sympathizers, the first name out of my mouth would be Rep. Mike Rogers of Michigan.

It gets worse.

The revelation about the judge’s role came late Wednesday at a briefing before the House Intelligence Committee. One lawmaker in the meeting asked FBI Deputy Director Sean Joyce why the FBI didn’t raise objections, according to another U.S. official. Mr. Joyce said in essence it wasn’t the FBI’s role to object to such a determination, the official said.

It came as a surprise to the nation’s lawmakers that it was not law enforcement’s role to intercede in the judiciary doing its job. In other words, something as basic and simple as the separation of powers, the administration of justice and due process elude these people who sit on the “Intelligence Committee”.

Let me repeat: the Constitution is self-executing. The rights exist, whether you like them or not, whether you say the magic words or not. The rights enumerated therein do not require the grace and goodwill of lawmakers like Mike Rogers of Michigan to “activate”. Do you want your Constitutional rights to be subject to the permission of Mike Rogers of Michigan?

Let Jon Stewart take it away: