The dark legacy of Jimmy Carter - Updated

One of the more lasting legacies any president can leave is his selection of judges to the Federal bench. From district judges all the way to the Justices of the Supreme Court, a president's choices can have far-reaching effects for decades after he himself has left office.

We saw one such example of the legacy effect today, when District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor ruled in Detroit that the NSA anti-terrorist surveillance program was unconstitutional and ordered it stopped. According to the injunction (PDF) granted the ACLU and other plaintiffs, Judge Taylor declared that the warrant-less wiretap program:

...violates the Separation of
Powers doctrine, the Administrative Procedures Act, the First and Fourth Amendments to the United States Constitution, the FISA and Title III;

According to her biography, Judge Taylor was appointed in 1979 by President Carter. Judging by this decision, she is apparently as competent to decide constitutional cases as he was to decide foreign policy. (Insert all the sarcasm you want here.)

While I haven't read her full decision (PDF) yet, and while I'm open to modifying my opinion after reading it, at first glance this is one of the most monumentally stupid decisions issued by a federal judge in recent years. She willfully tosses precedents from four federal appeals courts and a FISA appeals court that expressly affirm the legality of this type of surveillance based on the President's powers as Commander in Chief under Article II of the Constitution. In the Chicago Tribune, a Clinton-era Justice Department official argued the program was legal at the time it was revealed*. Even FDR conducted warrant-less surveillance of our enemies.

*(The original article is no longer publicly available at the Tribune site.)

Time and again, officials and former official of both parties have said that this program was vital to defending the people of the United States from terrorist attack. Jane Harman, Democrat of California and Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, declared it a "valuable [foreign] intelligence collection program." There can be no doubt that this program has saved lives and served as a vital tool in our war with a bunch of medieval fascists who are happy to kill thousands of civilians in their quest to impose their totalitarian version of Islam on us all.

But that doesn't matter to Judge Taylor. Instead, she buys the arguments of the ACLU and the jihadist-front organization CAIR that a program designed to intercept and monitor calls originating from terrorist suspects overseas to points in the United States is somehow a violation of privacy rights. Unbelievable.

The White House has already filed an appeal, and one hopes the 6th Circuit Court will overturn this idiocy. Meanwhile stay of her injunction on the government's appeal allows the NSA to continue this program.

This is just one example of the legacy of Jimmy Carter, perhaps the worst president of the 20th century and certainly the worst ex-president ever.

Thanks, Jimmy.

Powerline has a reaction here. I'm sure there will be more from Center-Right blogs in the days to come. Meanwhile, the moonbats at the Daily Kos are having a field day over this.

Update & Bump: I've read Judge Taylor's full decision (link above), and nothing I saw changed my mind. In a suit that one would think would exclusively focus on 4th amendment illegal search & seizure issues, she also bizarrely declares the program to be a violation of the plaintiffs' first amendment rights to free speech. I can only conclude she was searching for any reason to agree with the plaintiffs, no matter how tortured her reasoning. My prediction is that this will not survive the appeal to the Sixth Circuit, nor the inevitable counter-appeal to the US Supreme Court. However, the moonbat Left, which perversely sees its own government as a worse enemy than a bunch of head-chopping, mass-murdering jihadis, will use this decision as red meat to rally the faithful through election day.

For other opinions and analysis, see posts at various quality blogs and newspapers here, here, here, here, here, and here. An opinion agreeing with Judge Taylor is here, while the Left makes itself known here.