A majority of Americans want the Bush administration to get court approval before eavesdropping on people inside the United States, even if those calls might involve suspected terrorists, an AP-Ipsos poll shows.<\/p>\n
Over the past three weeks, President Bush and top aides have defended the electronic monitoring program they secretly launched shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, as a vital tool to protect the nation from al-Qaida and its affiliates.<\/p>\n
Yet 56 percent of respondents in an AP-Ipsos poll said the government should be required to first get a court warrant to eavesdrop on the overseas calls and e-mails of U.S. citizens when those communications are believed to be tied to terrorism.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
One disappointing result was the partisan breakdown. About three-fourths of Democrats want the president to get a warrant, but and two-thirds of Republicans don’t. There’s no reason for this. One of the GOP’s guiding principles is supposed to be limited government.<\/p>\n
For what it’s worth, the AP did follow-up interviews with many respondents, some of whom seemed to appreciate the issue at hand.<\/p>\n
But Peter Ahr of Caldwell, N.J., a religious studies professor at Seton Hall University, said he could not find a justification for skipping judicial approvals. Nor did he believe the administration’s argument that such a step would impair terrorism investigations.<\/p>\n
“We’re a nation of laws. … That means that everybody has to live by the law, including the administration,” said Ahr, 64, a Democrat who argues for checks and balances. “For the administration to simply go after wiretaps on their own without anyone else’s say-so is a violation of that principle.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Apparently, that sentiment is now held by the majority.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
On Dec. 28, Rasmussen Reports released a poll on the controversy of the day: Bush’s warrantless-search program. It was, unfortunately, largely useless, since it failed to ask respondents about the most controversial aspects of the domestic spying program. Of course, that didn’t stop the White House and its allies from touting the poll as proof […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6279","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6279","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6279"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6279\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6279"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6279"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6279"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}