Obama and Romney both worse than Bush on civil liberties
The Daily Caller reports,
The Obama administration’s use of executive power has gone further than the Bush administration’s toward diminishing Americans’ civil liberties, author John Yoo told The Daily Caller.
“Somehow the Obama administration has increased the protections for terrorists, while at the same time reducing them for the rest of us law-abiding citizens in the United States,” Yoo said after a panel discussion on his new book “Taming Globalization” at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C.
Yoo was deputy assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel at the U.S. Department of Justice during the Bush administration. During his tenure, he authored what came to be derided as the “torture memos,” which defined what techniques were acceptable to use during interrogations of terrorist suspects. . . .
“You don’t see the same critics who so thrashed President Bush, for allegedly thinking he was a king, making the same arguments and engaging in the same criticism of President Obama,” Yoo told TheDC.
Paultical Ticker adds,
If Bush was controversial for allowing terror suspects to be arrested and held indefinitely without trial, Obama’s National Defense Authorization Act allows American citizens to be arrested and held indefinitely without trial. This is unprecedented in our history.
It has become a general conservative consensus that the NDAA is bad legislation because it gives the Executive branch unconstitutional and dangerous new powers. Conservative champions in the Senate like Rand Paul, Mike Lee and Jim DeMint have fought against the NDAA’s indefinite detention provision and Rep. Justin Amash has spearheaded this effort in the House.
When Obama signed NDAA he said ”My administration will not authorize the indefinite military detention without trial of American citizens.”
This pretty much cemented the conservative consensus on NDAA–no president, and especially Obama, should be able to throw American citizens in jail indefinitely without trial or due process.
Mitt Romney disagrees. Not only would he sign NDAA without hesitation, his position is essentially no different from Obama’s. Watch this video:
http://youtu.be/D1yY3NCiMVQ