It should not, perhaps, have been much of a surprise that Democratic leaders seized on the dedication of the statue of one-time D.C. resident Frederick Douglass at the United States Capitol as a chance to speak up for D.C. statehood and home rule.

The ceremony was on Juneteenth, a holiday marking the day the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect in Texas that's celebrated in Washington, D.C., and 42 states as the formal end of slavery. It marked the legacy of a man who was a great opponent of that peculiar institution and friend and adviser to President Lincoln -- and also, less famously, the D.C. recorder of deeds and a resident of Anacostia. The statue itself was a gift from the District of Columbia.

The remarks on D.C. statehood gave a surprisingly local flavor to a ceremony honoring the historic contributions to America of the former slave, legendary orator, abolitionist, memoirist, and early feminist. Douglass was the first African American nominated as a vice-presidential contender, on the Equal Rights Party Ticket, and the first to receive a vote to be president, during Republican Party convention balloting in 1888. That -- along with his ties to Lincoln -- has made him a favorite historical figure in a contemporary Republican Party that struggles to reach African Americans at the ballot box and has elected few to national office since Reconstruction.

House Speaker John Boehner's office built an elaborate website devoted to the statue ceremony, and the speaker himself appeared slightly verklempt during his introductory remarks dedicating the statue of "one of the greatest Americans who ever lived."

But the vice president, Senate majority leader, and House minority leader all spoke on behalf of D.C.'s legislative autonomy and statehood during the ceremony in the Capitol Visitor Center's Emancipation Hall, taking the conversation in a direction less welcome to Republicans, who have opposed D.C. statehood. 

"Over a century ago, Douglass asked a good question. He said, what have the people of the District done that they should be excluded from the privileges of the ballot box?" Vice President Biden observed. "Many District representatives and residents, like Representative [Eleanor Holmes] Norton, can trace their families back to former slaves, who entered this District seeking freedom and helped build the city."

"We agree with -- the president and I -- with Senator Norton -- with Representative Norton and Frederick Douglass and support home rule, budget autonomy, and the vote for the people of the District of Columbia."

Harry Reid took things a step further than Biden and reiterated his long-standing call for D.C. statehood. "It is right and fitting that Frederick Douglass -- this extraordinary man, this unflinching voice for freedom, this unyielding advocate for justice -- should be honored with an enduring monument. And it is just and proper that more than 600,000 American citizens who reside in the District of Columbia should finally have a statue representing them here in the United States Capitol," he said.

"Washington, D.C., residents pay taxes, just like residents of Nevada, California, or any other state. Washington, D.C., residents have fought and died in every American war, just like residents of Ohio, Kentucky, or any other state. And Washington, D.C., residents deserve the same right to self-government and Congressional representation as residents of any other state.

"The District deserves statehood. And Congress should act to grant it."

It seemed a fitting tribute to a man who spent his life as an advocate for freedom and voting rights. 

Douglass's is the fourth bust or statue of an African American in the Capitol. Martin Luther King's visage arrived in 1986, but was not followed by Sojourner Truth until 2009. A statue of Rosa Parks arrived earlier this year.

In March, Rob Portman of Ohio became the only sitting Republican senator to come out in favor of gay marriage. Then, in April, he was joined by Mark Kirk of Illinois. On Wednesday, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska became the third, announcing her position in a local television interview and press statement.

Of the three, Murkowski represents by far the reddest state: 55 percent of Alaskans voted for Mitt Romney in 2012, whereas Ohio (narrowly) and Illinois (overwhelmingly) went for Barack Obama. Taken together, the three senators' switches represent the increasingly bipartisan momentum for gay marriage in American public opinion. An ABC News/Washington Post poll this month found 57 percent of Americans in favor of making gay marriage legal, and 10 of 11 national polls on the subject this year have found more Americans support than oppose the idea.

The senators' positions could have real consequences: A bill to repeal the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act could come to a vote as soon as this year, according to Senator Kirsten Gillibrand. At an event hosted by the center-left think tank Third Way on Tuesday, the New York Democrat said such a bill was "very close to the 60 votes we need, closer than people think." She named Murkowski and Senator Susan Collins of Maine as potential swing votes, adding, "There are a few other [Republicans] we're working with, but I won't out them."

Murkowski's statement makes an emotional case, telling the story of an Alaska lesbian military family with four adopted children. Her reasoning illustrates the progress made by Republican gay-marriage advocates in arguing that their position is an essentially conservative one. The senator depicts her position as one that advances the conservative priorities of individual liberty and family values: "We don't want the government in our pockets or our bedrooms," Murkowski writes. "We certainly don't need it in our families."

Here is Murkowski's full statement.

Not too long ago, I had the honor of nominating an Alaskan family as "Angels in Adoption," a celebration of the selflessness shown by foster care families and those who adopt children. They arrived in Washington, DC, a military family who had opened their doors to not one child but four siblings to make sure that these sisters and brother had the simplest gift you can give a child: a home together. We had lunch together, and they shared their stories with me. All the while, the children politely ate lunch and giggled as content youngsters do. Given my daily hectic Senate schedule, it's not often that I get to sit down with such a happy family during a workday -- and I think of them often, as everything our nation should encourage.

I bring them up because the partners were two women who had first made the decision to open their home to provide foster care to the eldest child in 2007. Years later -- and after a deployment abroad with the Alaska National Guard for one of them -- they embraced the joy and sacrifice of four adopted children living under the same roof, with smiles, laughter, movie nights, parent-teacher conferences and runny noses.

Yet despite signing up and volunteering to give themselves fully to these four adorable children, our government does not meet this family halfway and allow them to be legally recognized as spouses. After their years of sleepless nights, after-school pickups and birthday cakes, if one of them gets sick or injured and needs critical care, the other would not be allowed to visit them in the emergency room -- and the children could possibly be taken away from the healthy partner. They do not get considered for household health care benefit coverage like spouses nationwide. This first-class Alaskan family still lives a second-class existence.

The Supreme Court is set to make a pair of decisions on the topic of marriage equality shortly, and the national conversation on this issue is picking back up. This is a significant moment for our nation when it comes to rethinking our society's priorities and the role of government in Americans' private lives and decisions, so I want to be absolutely clear with Alaskans. I am a life-long Republican because I believe in promoting freedom and limiting the reach of government. When government does act, I believe it should encourage family values. I support the right of all Americans to marry the person they love and choose because I believe doing so promotes both values: it keeps politicians out of the most private and personal aspects of peoples' lives - while also encouraging more families to form and more adults to make a lifetime commitment to one another. While my support for same sex civil marriage is something I believe in, I am equally committed to guaranteeing that religious freedoms remain inviolate, so that churches and other religious institutions can continue to determine and practice their own definition of marriage.

With the notion of marriage -- an exclusive, emotional, binding 'til death do you part' tie -- becoming more and more an exception to the rule given a rise in cohabitation and high rates of divorce, why should the federal government be telling adults who love one another that they cannot get married, simply because they happen to be gay? I believe when there are so many forces pulling our society apart, we need more commitment to marriage, not less.

This thinking is consistent with what I hear from more and more Alaskans especially our younger generations. Like the majority of Alaskans, I supported a constitutional amendment in 1998 defining marriage as only between a man and a woman, but my thinking has evolved as America has witnessed a clear cultural shift. Fifteen years after that vote, I find that when one looks closer at the issue, you quickly realize that same sex unions or civil marriages are consistent with the independent mindset of our state - and they deserve a hands-off approach from our federal policies.

First, this is a personal liberty issue and has to do with the most important personal decision that any human makes. I believe that, as Americans, our freedoms come from God and not government, and include the rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. What could be more important to the pursuit of happiness than the right to choose your spouse without asking a Washington politician for permission? If there is one belief that unifies most Alaskans - our true north -- it is less government and more freedom. We don't want the government in our pockets or our bedrooms; we certainly don't need it in our families.

Secondly, civil marriage also touches the foundation of our national culture: safe, healthy families and robust community life. In so many ways, sound families are the foundation of our society. Any efforts or opportunity to expand the civil bonds and rights to anyone that wants to build a stable, happy household should be promoted.

Thirdly, by focusing on civil marriage -- but also reserving to religious institutions the right to define marriage as they see fit -- this approach respects religious liberty by stopping at the church door. As a Catholic, I see marriage as a valued sacrament that exists exclusively between a man and a woman. Other faiths and belief systems feel differently about this issue -- and they have every right to. Churches must be allowed to define marriage and conduct ceremonies according to their rules, but the government should not tell people who they have a right to marry through a civil ceremony.

I recently read an interview where Ronald Reagan's daughter said that she believes he would have supported same-sex marriage, that he would think "What difference does it make to anybody else's life? I also think because he wanted government out of peoples' lives, he would not understand the intrusion of government banning such a thing. This is not what he would have thought government should be doing."

Like Reagan, Alaskans believe that government works best when it gets out of the way. Countless Alaskans and Americans want to give themselves to one another and create a home together. I support marriage equality and support the government getting out of the way to let that happen.

Soon, the Supreme Court will hand down hotly anticipated verdicts on two cases related to gay marriage: a challenge to the Defense of Marriage Act, which denies federal marriage benefits to same-sex couples legally married in their states, and a challenge to California's Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage in that state based on a November 2008 ballot initiative. The decisions are likely to come either Thursday or next Monday, though the court could delay them further.

Based on lower courts' rulings and the justices' questions during oral arguments in March, gay-marriage advocates are cautiously optimistic, particularly where DOMA is concerned. The Prop 8 case was argued by the bipartisan team of Theodore Olson and David Boies, the Republican and Democrat superlawyers who opposed one another in Bush v. Gore. On Tuesday, at an event sponsored by the center-left think tank Third Way, Boies discussed the many outcomes for that case.

1. Gay Marriage for All! A lower court struck down Prop 8 on broad U.S. constitutional grounds, ruling that the gay-marriage ban violated equal protection and possibly due process. If the Supreme Court affirms this argument, it would make gay marriage legal nationwide, Boies said, "because, obviously, the Constitution applies to all 50 states."

2. Gay Marriage for California (Again)! A different lower court found Prop 8 unconstitutional on narrower grounds. Because the California Supreme Court made gay marriage legal in the state before Prop 8 made it illegal, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals said, in Boies' words, "once you grant rights to people, you can't take those rights away without due process." A decision on these grounds would restore gay marriage in California but leave other states unaffected.

3. Gay Marriage (and Civil Unions) for California! Another argument the court might buy is this: Since California already has civil unions for same-sex couples, there is no justification other than discrimination for barring them from describing those unions as "marriages," which they are in all but name. If the Supreme Court agrees with this argument, it would again make gay marriage legal only in California.

4. Get Outta Here! Prop 8 opponents made the technical argument that the proponents did not have legal standing to bring their case. California's governor and attorney general did not appeal the lower courts' rulings striking down Prop 8; it was activists who backed the law. "Do they have standing to come in and defend it? Under Supreme Court precedent, they probably do not," Boies said. "The Court has never granted standing to private citizens who do not have a fiduciary relationship to the state." If the Court rules this way, the lower court ruling overturning Prop 8 would stand, and gay marriage would be legal in California.

5. Never Mind! The Supreme Court could simply reverse its own decision to take up the case to begin with. This is rare, but it does occasionally happen. During oral arguments, Boies was surprised how many of the justices' queries seemed to question whether the timing was right to decide this issue. Such a move would again mean the appeals-court verdict is reinstated as the final word. Gay marriage would be legal in California.

6. No Gay Marriage for You! "There is one way we could lose," Boies said -- if the Court rules that the Prop 8 proponents do have standing and rejects all the constitutional arguments for gay marriage. Such a ruling would set a precedent that would make it more difficult to challenge other states' gay-marriage bans in court. "I certainly hope the court doesn't do that. I think there's no constitutional basis for it," he said. "But it is a possibility."

Critiques of democracy are as old as the excesses of the Athenian variety. Here's a classic: The unmediated masses are as capable of doing an injustice as any aristocracy or tyrant. In America, it's acceptable to say, as shorthand, that we're living in a Western liberal democracy. But the fact is that we live in a federal, constitutional republic, because the Framers mistrusted democracy, and the vast majority of Americans retain a great part of that mistrust. We've extended the franchise, amended the Constitution to permit the direct election of senators, and we're likely to eventually abandon the electoral college and elect presidents by the popular vote. But there is broad, deep support for anti-democratic features of our system, like the Bill of Rights.

All of this is totally uncontroversial -- unless it is uttered by Senator Rand Paul, the national politician most likely to evoke irrational paranoia from the political press. Serial anti-libertarian Jonathan Chait is the latest to demonstrate this truth in an unintentionally revealing item at New York.

Here's how he begins:

The most unusual and interesting line in Julia Ioffe's highly interesting profile of Rand Paul is Paul's confession, "I'm not a firm believer in democracy. It gave us Jim Crow." Of course, that's an awfully strange way to condemn Jim Crow, which arose in the distinctly undemocratic Apartheid South (it was no coincidence that the dismantling of Jim Crow and the granting of democratic rights to African-Americans happened simultaneously).

This is an uncharitable beginning. If a scholar of political thought said of ancient Athens, "I'm not a firm believer in democracy -- it required slavery, war, or both, to subsidize the lower classes while they carried out their civic duties," no one would think that a strange formulation -- it is perfectly coherent to talk about democracy in places that didn't extend the franchise universally, given how the term has been used and understood for two thousand years of political history.

What's more, if we include the context that Chait stripped out in his excerpt, Paul's point is perfectly clear. He was visiting a historically black college:

To approving nods, he talked about how urban renewal had really meant "urban destruction" and about how "they tore down a lot of black businesses so people would go to white stores." He found that this crowd, if not totally convinced, was receptive. Though he would still not give them a definitive answer on his position on the Civil Rights Act, he did say that he believed federal intervention had been justified. "I'm not a firm believer in democracy," he explained. "It gave us Jim Crow."

Even in the article, we have no idea what sentences Paul spoke immediately before or after that. Suffice it to say that if anyone else in the United States said, of federal intervention in the Jim Crow South, "They did the right thing overruling decisions made locally in Alabama and Mississippi, even though it was anti-democratic," no one would blink, let alone criticize the speaker.

But Chait takes the quote and turns it into a conspiracy. "It's not just a gaffe or another historical misrepresentation," he writes, "rather, it's an authentic clue into an ideology Paul has been busily concealing as he has ascended into mainstream politics." What hidden ideology does Chait discern?

Rand Paul, like his father, is deeply influenced by the political-economic philosophy of Ayn Rand. Paul usually soft-peddles his Randism, though he sometimes communicates to fellow believers through dog whistles, like playing Rush (who once dedicated an album to "the genius of Ayn Rand") at his victory speech.

Rand's philosophy is a kind of inverted Marxism, imagining politics as a struggle between a virtuous producer class that creates all wealth and the parasites who exploit them. (Marx believed the workers produced all wealth and the capitalists robbed it from them; Rand believed roughly the opposite.) Also like Marx, Rand considered conventional democratic government as a cover for this kind of exploitation. If the majority could tax the rich to benefit itself, this was tyranny.

He goes on:

Here's Rand summarizing her aversion to democracy: "I do not believe that a majority can vote a man's life, or property, or freedom away from him," she argued. A less militant version of this philosophy is now the dominant credo of the Republican Party.

As I read this, I couldn't help but think of Chait as a left-leaning analogue to the character in Bob Dylan's "Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues."Those Objectivists were coming around / They were in the air / They were on the Ground / They wouldn't give me no peace. For 2,000 years, critics of unmediated democracy have warned about the masses abusing individuals and minorities. The American system was built from the very beginning to check democratic excesses.

But if Rand Paul distrusts democracy he must've gotten it from Ayn Rand. 

It's also interesting that Chait regards Rand's formulation as "militant." Let's look at it again. "I do not believe that a majority can vote a man's life, or property, or freedom away from him." Does Chait believe that a democratic majority should be able to vote a man's life or freedom away? I know that Chait (like Rand Paul) believes that the government can tax a portion of a citizen's wealth. Should a democratic majority be able to single out an individual man and vote away his property? Believing otherwise is certainly not unique to Objectivists, libertarians, or Republicans.

What Chait did is hardly unique. In the political press, it happens again and again: libertarian leaning folks are portrayed as if they're radical, extremist ideologues, even when they're expressing ideas that are widely held by Americans across the political spectrum. Here is the absurd cover The New Republic chose for the issue in which the Paul profile appears:

This would seem to imply that, relative to other politicians, the guy who went on Rachel Maddow to discuss the nuances of his take on the Civil Rights Act is the one hiding his "real" self from us. Remember the conservatives who kept saying, "Obama is hiding something -- he's not one of us"? That magazine cover is what it looks like when liberals cave to a similar pathology.

Let's peek inside the story that Julia Ioffe wrote (which, despite some flaws, is a lot fairer than the magazine cover, which it doesn't support). Here's how she characterizes Paul's philosophy:

... though he has staked out more moderate or traditionally Republican positions than his father, at his core, Rand retains the same pre-New Deal vision of hyper-minimalist government and isolationist foreign policy. In other words, Paul has managed to take the essence of his father's radical ideology -- more radical than that of any modern presidential candidate -- and turn it into a plausible campaign for the Republican nomination.

And here's a passage from later on in the article:

At a Tea Party event in Louisville, I sat down with Paul and asked him to explain his theory of government's proper role. "What the Constitution says," he told me curtly. "The Constitution has about 19 enumerated powers; that's what it should do. Primary among those, at the federal level, is national defense, and that's the primary function of what the government should be doing." As always, Paul wore a red penny on his lapel, a Tea Party invocation of the national debt. He continued: "There are other things that we've been doing for quite a while, and what I would say is that we try to make them as efficient as possible. Things like Social Security and Medicare need to be made solvent."

This seemed to be a departure from his father, who refused to accept Medicare and Medicaid in his private practice because he deemed it "stolen money."

If Paul's avowed position is that we should keep doing Social Security and Medicare as efficiently as possible, a concession his father never made, then how is it accurate to write that "at his core, Rand retains the same pre-New Deal vision of hyper-minimalist government" as his father? * The piece goes on to add nuance and contradict that "core" passage, to its credit, but that's sort of the point: Even in the face of contradictory evidence, the most extremist portrayal is asserted as if it's true. Like the cover surrounding the magazine story, everything is wrapped in paranoia.

Then there's what is missing from the piece.

I'm still waiting for a profile of Paul that grapples with his actual behavior in the U.S. Senate. As I wrote earlier this year:

When Rand Paul emerged on the national scene in 2010, staffers at places like The Cato Institute and Reason backed him more enthusiastically than any other U.S. Senate candidate. Like all Tea Party-affiliated pols, Paul favored smaller government, tax cuts, and free-market reforms. Unlike Marco Rubio or Christine O'Donnell, the Kentucky Republican was expected by right-leaning libertarians to oppose the bipartisan excesses of the post-9/11 era. As Radley Balko argued that spring, Paul would be better on civil liberties than President Obama and most Senate Democrats. Few non-libertarians believed him, as evidenced by the skeptical replies of progressive writers Adam Serwer and Jamelle Bouie, savvy civil libertarians in their own right.

Three years later, it is beyond dispute: Paul is a leading opponent of civil-liberties abrogations, executive-power excesses, and militarism. Safe to say, after last week's filibuster, that his stands on those issues are the most visible and consequential that he has taken in the Senate. Even prior to that 13-hour spectacle, Paul mounted high-profile, sometimes lonely efforts to reform the Patriot Act; formally end the president's authorization to wage war in Iraq; reform drug laws; prevent indefinite detention; extend Fourth Amendment protections to electronic communications; require warrants for drone surveillance; reform overzealous TSA screening procedures; and stop an anti-piracy bill that would have onerously infringed on free expression online.

He's also opposed calls to wage war in Libya, Syria, and Iran. 

In light of this record, the establishment press ought to reflect upon the fact that its 2010 coverage utterly failed to anticipate the most important consequences of electing Paul to the Senate.

Alas, the political press is mostly blind to the radicalism of the establishment politicians and policies that Paul is critiquing. Secretly building a pervasive surveillance state? Not treated as radical. And consider: even if Obama sends American troops into Syria, Chait will regard Paul as more dangerous.

Will the irrational double standards ever end?

__
*Ioffe also repeatedly refers to Paul as an "isolationist" without defining the term, and, I'd argue, without understanding it. It is strange to describe a man who favors mass immigration and globalized free trade as "isolationist." Perhaps it would be better to say that he is averse to foreign wars and most foreign aid.

I'm old enough to remember when Barack Obama's association with Bill Ayers, the former Weather Underground member, gave some people the idea that Obama was a dangerous radical who couldn't be trusted in office.

Add to the list of people who agree that Obama is a dangerous radical one Bill Ayers.

Ayers is basically incapable of giving a non-entertaining interview -- remember his dinner with Tucker Carlson? -- and a talk with Tom Bevan and Charlie Stone of Real Clear Politics is no exception. The retired education professor tells them he'd assign Obama a "failing grade" as a president, though he cautions that's true of every other president in his lifetime, and that he likes Obama personally. Then his exchange, lightly edited to remove crosstalk:

Q: Isn't Barack Obama, as the sole authority for drone use, engaged in terrorist activity?

A: Absolutely.

Q: So what's the repsopnse?

A: What's the response? The response is to oppose it.

Q: Do you think Barack Obama should be put on trial for war crimes?

A: Every president in this century shold be put on trial.... for war crimes.

Q: In the Hague?

A: Absolutely. Every one of them goes into an office dropping with blood and adds to it. And yes, I think these are war crimes. I think they're acts of terror.

That's a bold statement coming from a man who led an organization that planned acts of terrorism. The capsule version: After an accidental 1970 explosion in a West Village townhouse killed three Weathermen, Ayers became a fugitive. He was later charged with "conspiracy to bomb police stations and government buildings," but the charges were dropped because of prosecutorial misconduct. He then went on to a career as an education professor in Chicago, where he befriended a young Obama.

Of course, none of this necessarily means Ayers is wrong; his ability to critique Obama is entirely separate from his past. But this comment Ayers made PBS in 2008 seems telling: "It's impossible to not have lots and lots of regrets about lots and lots of things, but the question of did we do something that was horrendous, awful? .... I don't think so. I think what we did was to respond to a situation that was unconscionable."

Even those who deplore Ayers' actions can surely read that statement and feel a tug of familiarity -- who hasn't reacted viscerally, perhaps too viscerally, in a matter we believe in, or done what we thought was the right and only choice at the time? It isn't hard to imagine Obama making much the same argument about his prosecution of the drone war a few decades on, and it's surprising that Ayers doesn't see the parallels with himself and look on the president with a bit more empathy.

Hat tip: Aaron Blake

Another week, another awkward remark about pregnancy from a Republican lawmaker.

Last week, it was Rep. Trent Franks' comments about the frequency of pregnancy from rape, the validity and meaning of which have been subject to a tediously hair-spliting debate. This week, it's Rep. Michael Burgess, a Texan, with this:

Watch a sonogram of a 15-week baby, and they have movements that are purposeful. They stroke their face. If they're a male baby, they may have their hand between their legs. If they feel pleasure, why is it so hard to believe that they could feel pain?

OK, so this is fun to laugh at: Masturbating fetuses! And it's a silly thing to say. But it's worth at least looking at what Burgess -- who is an OB/GYN by profession -- was trying to talk about.

First, what is Burgess referring to directly? As The Atlantic Wire's Alex Abad-Santos thinks Burgess was talking about a 1996 letter to the The American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology. It's not available online, but Abad-Santos posted this excerpt:

But that doesn't totally make sense, either, since it refers exclusively to female fetal masturbation, whereas Burgess suggested that only male fetuses masturbate -- perhaps a misunderstanding, or a misremembering. Certainly it would fall into age-old tropes about the genders. It may come as little surprise that there hasn't been much other research into the topic; this 1987 paper isn't available online. The point is that there's no clear expert to consult on the matter, and the only literature on the topic is two case reports -- basically, situations where doctors saw what they believed was fetuses touching their genitals, not rigorous research on the topic -- from 16 and 25 years ago. One might also reasonably ask how effectively a researcher could determine that a fetus was mastubating, for pleasure, using blurry ultrasound images. And besides, a 20-week-old fetus isn't capable of actions like grasping.

In any case, this is sort of a sideshow: The point Burgess was trying to make was about fetal pain, after all ("If they feel pleasure, why is it so hard to believe that they could feel pain?"). That's actually a part of a much older, and much more researched debate. Pro-life campaigners have argued that fetuses can feel pain, offering that as a reason for banning or restricting abortions. You may recall that throughout 2011, many states passed or considered laws that banned abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy, on the basis that after that point, fetuses can feel pain. Burgess and Franks both made their comments in the course of debate on a House bill that would do the same thing at the national level. (Practically, the bill is a purely symbolic measure: The Democratic Senate is unlikely to take the bill up, it wouldn't pass it, and President Obama would not sign it into law.)

Politically, this is an interesting example of pro-life campaigners choosing to chip away at abortion through piecemeal efforts rather than going for all-out restrictions, which have proven politically unpopular and legislatively elusive. Scientifically, it's a minefield, but most doctors seem to believe that fetuses can't feel pain before the third trimester. That was the conclusion of a 2005 literature review in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Major professional groups have concurred. In 2012, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists said, referring to an earlier version of the current bill, "The medical profession produced a rigorous scientific review of the available evidence on fetal pain in Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) in 2005. The review concluded that fetal perception of pain is unlikely before the third trimester. No new studies since the publication of the JAMA paper have changed this dominant view of the medical profession." The British Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists came to a similar position, stating, "The fetus cannot feel pain before 24 weeks because the connections in the fetal brain are not fully formed."

There are dissenters. Kanwaljeet J.S. Anand, a professor at the University of Tennessee Medical Center has testified that fetuses can likely feel pain at 20 weeks and perhaps earlier, and that their sensations may in fact be stronger than babies. (Anand, interestingly, doesn't describe himself as pro-life or pro-choice, saying his views vary depending on specifics.)

It seems as though Burgess is playing a little fast and loose with the science, both on fetal masturbation and on fetal pain, and his comments on the former are being received as a bit of an absurdity. Rightly so, perhaps. But it's worth focusing on the fetal pain question, since it seems to be the focus of the abortion debate for the foreseeable future. With a sizable and energized pro-life caucus and a passionate base, Republicans in Congress show no sign of ramping down their campaign for 20-week restrictions.

John Boehner wants immigration reform to pass. To get it done, the House speaker will have to capitalize on the widening gap among conservatives, and he's preparing the groundwork to do it.

The rare split inside the conservative wing of Boehner's Republican conference offers him an uncommon opportunity to bring a bill to the floor without facing an insurrection among his members. It also means convincing enough conservatives that passing some immigration measure won't be preamble to the Senate using compromise negotiations to jam a more liberal version down the House's throat.

As a senior GOP leadership aide put it, "Our conference is all over the place. Our goal here is to try and find that little slice of land where we can walk through and we're not crucified on either side."

Republicans on and off the Hill say Boehner, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, and House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy all want to do something on immigration. Boehner "really wants to get that done but he has to be real quiet about it because if he puts his name on it and his brand on it, like he did with the big (fiscal-cliff) deal, then it's probably going to die under its own weight," a former GOP leadership aide said.

So House leaders have been meeting privately with members, making the case that inaction on immigration will be more costly than doing something. Weeks into the debate, it remains a hard sell among reform opponents, particularly members who do not want to offer citizenship to people here illegally. They worry that any House legislation -- such as a tough border-security bill most of them are after -- will ultimately be watered down in negotiations with the Senate.

"What will have to happen, and is happening in private discussions, is that we have to convince these guys if we're going to go to conference, we're not going to cave on our principles," a senior House GOP aide said. "That is the sales job you have to make to those guys."

But it's a hard argument to win -- and not only because Republicans don't think Democrats have much incentive to accept anything other than the Senate bill.

Plaguing House leadership is a fear among conservatives that immigration reform could be one of those few pieces of legislation that Boehner might value enough to bring to the floor knowing it would pass even though it fails to get the majority of House Republicans to back it.

"This is one of those issues where they may only get 80 to 100 Republicans to vote for it on the House floor, but there won't be the huge internal backlash," the former aide said. "And that gives (leadership) some room to maneuver and they have some conservative cover. They have (Sen. Marco) Rubio and (Rep. Raul) Labrador," who are two key conservative Republicans pushing reform.

Some in leadership scoff at the notion of bringing anything to the floor without majority Republican support. "I just can't see that happening," a House GOP leadership aide said.

Boehner spokesman Michael Steel said, "Our goal is always to pass legislation with strong Republican support consistent with our principles."

A number of influential congressional Republicans believe that giving the 11 million people living in the country illegally a path to citizenship opens up a new pool of voters who share the GOP's entrepreneurial, family, and religious values.

"There's no reason why these people can't be our voters except for the fact that you have (GOP Rep.) Steve King out there talking about electrifying our border fence," the senior GOP aide said.

But before that happens, Republican leaders need to convert more skeptical lawmakers into believers.

Back when he was first seeking the Democratic Party's nomination for president, Barack Obama often questioned free-trade agreements like NAFTA. By the end of his first year in office, however, President Obama had already notified Congress that the U.S. would join Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) free-trade negotiations. In October 2011 -- albeit with considerable prodding from Republicans -- he submitted free-trade agreements negotiated by the Bush Administration with Colombia, Panama, and South Korea to Congress. During this year's State of the Union address, Obama reaffirmed his commitment to the TPP, and announced that the U.S. would also pursue a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) free-trade agreement with EU countries.

The sheer scope of these deals is staggering. The TPP negotiations now include Brunei, Chile, Singapore, New Zealand, Canada, Australia, Vietnam, Peru, Malaysia, Mexico, and very soon, Japan. These nations have a collective GDP of about $11 trillion. For some perspective, U.S. annual GDP is $15 trillion; China's is $7.3 trillion. U.S. joining the TPP is like entering into a deal with a country that has the world's second-largest economy. It could add an estimated $76 billion per year to the U.S. economy. To put this in context, that's equal to about 90 percent of the money saved by this year's sequester. The TPP is also crucial to the administration's "Asia pivot." China is pursuing free-trade agreements in Asia, and the TPP is an effort to balance out Chinese potential dominance in the region.

And the TTIP is even bigger. It would create the largest free-trade zone in the world and produce a $1 trillion annual increase in GDP for the economies on both sides of the Atlantic, according to a European Commission study.

If Obama could negotiate and implement just these two agreements, he would almost without question be the most successful trade president in U.S. history. But the Constitution charges Congress, not the president, with regulating commerce, which means Congress has to pass legislation implementing any agreements the president negotiates. And this is where the administration may have a huge problem on its hands.

In his book American Trade Politics, Professor I. M. Destler describes what he calls the "imbalance" that always afflicts debates over trade policy:

Producers and workers threated by imports tend to be concentrated, organized, and ready and able to press their interests in the political arena. Those who benefit from trade are generally diffuse, and their stake in any particular trade matter is usually small.

In any political battle over trade, this gives the upper hand to anti-trade voices. This is important to keep in mind now, because the success or failure of the TPP and the TTIP -- and the potential trillions in added wealth for the nation's coffers -- will likely be determined by vote in Congress that may take place as early as July.

Candidate Obama attacked free-trade agreements in 2008 because he knew that they were unpopular with important Democratic constituencies, especially organized labor. Although Obama won't face voters again, members of Congress don't have that luxury.

It is generally agreed that the Obama will not be able to conclude the TPP and TTIP negotiations unless Congress grants him Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) -- commonly known as "fast-track" -- which guarantees that Congress will hold a straight up or down vote on any trade agreement the president negotiates. Trade agreements must be voted out of committee, and members can't offer amendments.

The logic behind fast-track is obvious: Since Congress has the final say on U.S. laws governing commerce, the president speaks not for himself but for the 535 members of Congress during trade negotiations, since trade partners can't be expected to negotiate with 535 legislators. Congress still has to ratify anything the president agrees to, but as a single package. That gives trade partners the assurance that what's hammered out at the negotiating table will remain in place.

When Congress grants TPA to a president, the authorizing legislation always includes negotiating objectives. This is a reminder to the president that he is acting as a delegate from Congress. The negotiating objectives themselves, however, often become the major point of contention. It was a battle over labor and environmental standards, for example, that prevented the House from granting President Clinton fast-track authority in 1998. This time, the list of concerns might well grow to include broader definitions of things like state-owned industries and currency manipulation.

Another issue that's likely be attached to any discussion of TPA will be something called Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA), a program to help retrain workers whose jobs are lost as a result of free-trade deals. TAA was renewed in October of 2011 and linked to approval of the three agreements approved by the Congress at that time. Since TAA is due to expire at the end of this year, it is bound to part of any legislation authorizing fast-track.

In the Senate, Democrat Max Baucus is already leading the charge for the renewal of TPA. He can expect significant Republican support, but may have some trouble corralling members of his own party. Democrat Sherrod Brown, whose power base in Northeast Ohio's Rust Belt remains upset about the 1994 NAFTA, has already expressed reservations. And since fast-track authorization is subject to filibuster, Obama may need all the votes he can get.

The battle in the House might be even more interesting. Consider a recent piece by Renee Parsons, a former environmental lobbyist, in the Huffington Post:

As proposed, the TPA would eliminate Congress' Constitutional responsibility as defined in Article I, Section 8 .... There is nothing ambiguous about Constitutional intent in 1789 -- having just concluded a revolutionary war against an imperial autocrat ... separation of powers and "checks and balances" were a clear decision by the country's founders to prevent a strong executive from usurping power from the legislative branch -- and that included foreign trade.

You're about as likely to find Parsons, who blogs for the site True Blue Progressive, at a Tea Party rally as you are to find Sarah Palin at a PETA convention. Still, Parson's argument would get heads nodding at a Tea Party gathering. One can easily see an odd alliance in the House between progressive Democrats, who reflect the concerns of organized labor, and Tea Party Republicans, who don't want to give power away to the president. Even Rep. Darrell Issa, usually a free-trade advocate, might oppose it because of suspicions about the secretive nature of the TPP negotiations.

In order to follow through on his trade agenda, Obama is going to have to figure out a way to craft a coalition of Democrats and Republicans. Unfortunately for him, he hasn't shown himself to be very adept at this sort of bridge building. So far, in fact, Obama has avoided getting involved at all, and hasn't even formally asked Congress to grant him fast-track. What the president needs to understand if, as it appears, he wants to establish a free-trade legacy, is that the toughest trade negotiators he will face are not in Tokyo or Brussels but on Capitol Hill.

USA Today has published an extraordinary interview with three former NSA employees who praise Edward Snowden's leaks, corroborate some of his claims, and warn about unlawful government acts.

Thomas Drake, William Binney, and J. Kirk Wiebe each protested the NSA in their own rights. "For years, the three whistle-blowers had told anyone who would listen that the NSA collects huge swaths of communications data from U.S. citizens," the newspaper reports. "They had spent decades in the top ranks of the agency, designing and managing the very data collection systems they say have been turned against Americans. When they became convinced that fundamental constitutional rights were being violated, they complained first to their superiors, then to federal investigators, congressional oversight committees and, finally, to the news media." 

In other words, they blew the whistle in the way Snowden's critics suggest he should have done. Their method didn't get through to the members of Congress who are saying, in the wake of the Snowden leak, that they had no idea what was going on. But they are nonetheless owed thanks.

And among them, they've now said all of the following:

• His disclosures did not cause grave damage to national security.

• What Snowden discovered is "material evidence of an institutional crime."

• As a system administrator, Snowden "could go on the network or go into any file or any system and change it or add to it or whatever, just to make sure -- because he would be responsible to get it back up and running if, in fact, it failed. So that meant he had access to go in and put anything. That's why he said, I think, 'I can even target the president or a judge.' If he knew their phone numbers or attributes, he could insert them into the target list which would be distributed worldwide. And then it would be collected, yeah, that's right. As a super-user, he could do that."

• "The idea that we have robust checks and balances on this is a myth."

• Congressional overseers "have no real way of seeing into what these agencies are doing. They are totally dependent on the agencies briefing them on programs, telling them what they are doing."

• Lawmakers "don't really don't understand what the NSA does and how it operates. Even when they get briefings, they still don't understand."

• Asked what Edward Snowden should expect to happen to him, one of the men, William Binney, answered, "first tortured, then maybe even rendered and tortured and then incarcerated and then tried and incarcerated or even executed." Interesting that this is what a whistleblower thinks the U.S. government will do to a citizen. The abuse of Bradley Manning worked.
  

• "There is no path for intelligence-community whistle-blowers who know wrong is being done. There is none. It's a toss of the coin, and the odds are you are going to be hammered."

The fact that former NSA employees have said these things doesn't automatically make them true. All have reason to identify with Snowden (though one thinks he may have crossed a line by talking about surveillance on China). What this interview does mean is that some of Snowden's allegations seem even more credible than they did when he was the only one making them.

NSA surveillance poses a particularly thorny challenge to conservative War on Terror hawks, who are forced to confront the tension between two things they believe: 1) The Obama Administration shouldn't ever be trusted. 2) We're at war, and the Obama Administration must be trusted with extraordinary powers to stop the enemy, despite the theoretical potential for abuse. 

It is tough to advance both arguments at once.

If the Obama Administration can be trusted to put the names of American citizens on a secret targeted-killing list and amass a secret database that holds years of our private digital communications, why object to a non-secret panel that reviews the efficacy of medical procedures? And if they're using the IRS to target their enemies, why not the NSA?

Charles Krauthammer comes as close to having it both ways as anyone. "The object is not to abolish these vital programs, it's to fix them," he wrote in a Washington Post column on NSA surveillance. "Not exactly easy to do amid the current state of national agitation -- provoked largely because such intrusive programs require a measure of trust in government, and this administration has forfeited that trust amid an unfolding series of scandals and a basic problem with truth-telling."

Tension cleverly evaded, if left unresolved. It's little surprise that Kevin Drum of Mother Jones flagged that same column. But I must say that I was surprised and disheartened by the particulars of the rebuttal Drum offered. In fact, it's emblematic of an attitude that helps explain our out-of-control surveillance state.

The headline: "Today's Chin Scratcher: Why Are People So Distrustful of Big Government." Here's Drum, channeling Krauthammer:

To summarize: People are groundlessly suspicious of vital panopticonish surveillance programs, and this is all due to Barack Obama's weaselly ways, not to the Republican Party's relentless 30-year campaign to destroy the public's faith in domestic programs of all sorts, mock the very idea that government accomplishes anything useful, and pander to the black-helicopter conspiracy theories of the Glenn Beck crowd.

Sorry Charlie, that's not going to fly. If you spend decades inventing scandals out of whole cloth and insisting that big government is a menace to liberty, don't be surprised when it turns out that an awful lot of people no longer have any trust in government. You reap what you sow.

It isn't that Drum's comments are totally off-base. Conservative elites do sometimes verge into frivolous, conspiratorial nonsense when they vilify government. It is ironic when they complain that a rank-and-file they've taught to mistrust government is too distrustful of government efforts they favor. At the same time, regardless of whatever nonsense Glenn Beck is spewing this week, it is perfectly rational to mistrust big government, particularly in the realm of national security.

Drum writes as if that isn't true.

Elsewhere, he's been diligently trying to nail down the facts about exactly what the NSA is doing. But like so many American commentators, he proceeds as if Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald, and others are wrong to proceed from the premise that "big government" is untrustworthy. In doing so, he is the one who isn't following the facts where they lead. 

Why should reality-based, empirically minded Americans like Drum be distrustful of big government, insist on transparency, be on constant guard against abuses, and object to the NSA's surveillance capabilities, even if, technically, there are policy safeguards in place to prevent abuses? For the same reason an alcoholic with three years dry raises red flags when he stocks his liquor cabinet with promises that he'll never have more than one drink: It always ends badly. 

Forget the ideological battle between liberals and conservatives about the size of government, the social safety net, the commerce clause, and all the rest. That's not the kind of big government this column is about. Let's review some hard, indisputable facts about recent American history:

• The U.S. government is currently imprisoning dozens of people believed to present no threat to national security at Guantanamo Bay, where mere innocence has never been sufficient to be released.

• Innocent Muslim Americans in New York City were subject to a secret program of racial profiling and spying, initiated by the Bloomberg Administration and known to the Obama Administration -- indeed, Obama's top counterterrorism advisor John Brennan defended the effort.

• In recent years, the FBI has repeatedly violated surveillance laws, misstated facts in National Security Letters it submits, and tried to cover up its unlawful behavior after the fact. 

• The U.S. government instituted an official program of torture in secret. Its architects were never seriously investigated or charged, despite the obligation to do so under a duly ratified treaty -- and even worse, many people complicit in the torture staff the national-security state even today. 

• When indisputable evidence emerged that the Bush Administration conducted illegal warrantless surveillance on American citizens, and that various telecom companies violated the law by aiding government efforts, no one was prosecuted. By providing retroactive immunity to the lawbreakers instead, President Obama played a direct role in this injustice.
  

These are far from the only official abuses to occur in the post-9/11 era. Whole books have been written detailing the misleading, negligent behavior of the national-security decision-makers who paved the way for the Iraq invasion, presided over the Abu Ghraib prison, and looked away as private defense contractors stole from American taxpayers and misbehaved abroad. But surely the points above are sufficient reason to harbor a deep, abiding mistrust of the government.

That isn't to say that it can or should be abolished.

America needs a federal government. It needs national-security officials, and even classified programs -- I don't want or need to know the identities of those trying to infiltrate al-Qaeda cells. But the case for being distrustful is air-tight. The case for demanding transparency, and assuming that secret surveillance programs will be abused, is supported by all the relevant history. The case for more robust oversight, by Congress, the press, and the public, is firmly grounded in experience. The notion that American security depends on a pervasive surveillance state maintained in secret -- something we've never had -- is totally without precedent, and the evidence presented for it so far is "trust us." And that we shouldn't trust is obvious.

Let's go back a bit farther, to the 1970s.

"The rampant abuses uncovered by the Church Committee, recall, had in many instances gone undisclosed to the public for decades," indispensable policy expert Julian Sanchez writes at the Cato Institute. "This is for the unsurprising reason that when government officials illegally misuse information obtained in secret surveillance programs, they tend not to send out press releases about it, but rather make covert and indirect use of the information -- as via targeted leaks -- and conceal their actions as far as possible, which the shroud of secrecy facilitates."

Among the abuses uncovered long after the fact:

• Secret efforts to undermine Martin Luther King as a result of his activism on behalf of racial equality

• An FBI attempt to destroy a dissident political party

• Improper surveillance of private citizens by the military

• Warrantless wiretapping

• Domestic FBI and CIA mail-opening programs

Again, the abuses uncovered by the Church Committee -- long after most of them took place and went undetected for lack of oversight -- are far more broad than the ones I've summarized and linked.

But they suffice to make the point. There is no reason to think that the Americans who staff the government today, and the politicians who preside over them, are somehow less prone to abusing their authority when afforded the ability to act in secret, nor that they'll remain so for the foreseeable future, through unknown presidents of both parties -- an argument that no one seems willing to make and defend. So it is irrational, even foolhardy, to permit the sort of official secrecy that the Bush and Obama Administrations have shortsightedly and arrogantly championed.

Drum isn't unsympathetic to much of what I've written, and if it were up to him, civil liberties would be far more secure than they are today. But given that he shares my horror at the abuses in the Church Committee report, the abuses of the Bush years, and the abuses of the Obama years -- and could surely write a long magazine piece about the abuses of Reagan, Bush and Clinton too -- I can't understand why he treats the posture of distrusting government as suspect.

It is rational.

The reflexive trust of some legislators and establishment journalists is far more irrational, ideological, and historically illiterate. The real "chin scratcher" is why so many have trusted Bush and Obama, even as they demanded levels of secrecy and executive branch autonomy that would corrupt anyone, even knowing that mixing secrecy and the surveillance state produced alarming government abuse before. Drum should refrain from treating mistrust in government as if it is mostly the irrational consequence of believing lies told by right-wing entertainers.

The lies the government constantly tells are the more relevant factor.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker polls near the bottom of would-be presidential contenders. Unlike potential rivals, you won't find him on the cover of Time magazine or slow-jamming the news with comedian Jimmy Fallon.

But he's a conservative Republican who won election in a blue state, survived a brutal recall campaign, and now posts approval ratings over 50 percent. A budget-slashing chief executive and son of a Baptist minister who straddles the fiscal and social conservative camps. A proven fundraiser who has put his thumb in the eye of President Obama and Big Labor.

He's poised to be the sleeper Republican presidential candidate of 2016.

"The recall was a gift to him in that it put him in touch with the big funders in the Republican Party, and I'm sure he keeps that Rolodex pretty close," said Brian Sikma, a spokesman for a conservative government watchdog group in Wisconsin. "I don't see any reason why he wouldn't run, and if you look at the tea leaves, he's taking all the traditional steps."

"I'm sure in next few months you'll find him somewhere in New Hampshire," said Milwaukee-based Republican consultant Todd Robert Murphy.

Walker has told the national media he's not ruling out a White House bid, and he headlined a Republican Party fundraiser last month in Iowa, which traditionally hosts the first presidential nominating contest, followed by New Hampshire. The governor is also writing a book about his triumph in the 2012 recall election after he revoked collective bargaining rights and set off a political firestorm.

This positioning for the national stage comes as no surprise to Wisconsin Republicans, who joke that Walker has been running for president since he was an ambitious politician-in-the-making at the American Legion's Badger Boys State. He was picked to represent Wisconsin at Boys Nation in Washington, D.C. and, in a moment he describes as seminal to his political career, met President Reagan. He was only 22 years old when he ran his first campaign for the State Assembly.

Last week, Walker gratified the religious right and provoked the Democratic Party when he said he would sign a bill requiring women seeking abortions to get ultrasound exams. The legislation is similar to the controversial law signed by Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell. Eager to keep flogging the GOP's alleged "war on women," Democrats linked Walker's promise to sign the abortion bill with the recent vote by a all-male House committee to ban abortions after 20 weeks and Arizona Rep. Trent Franks' comment that rape victims infrequently get pregnant.

Democrats have also been taking shots at Wisconsin's economic record in the wake of Walker's fiscal reforms. Wisconsin was recently ranked 44th in private sector job creation. In another potential blemish on Walker's record, an audit last month found financial mismanagement at the state's economic development agency.

"Walker has put himself in a perilous position to pander to caucus-goers in Iowa rather than creating jobs and fixing the economy," said Danny Kanner, a spokesman for the Democratic Governors Association.

But despite the attacks, Democrats have struggled to find a credible challenger eager to run against Walker in 2014. The governor amassed a $30 million war chest for the recall campaign, while depleting the labor unions. Charles Franklin, a Marquette University professor of law and public policy, said Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson is viewed as more beatable in 2016 than Walker is in 2014.

"The Democratic bench is thin right now, and Democrats face a real issue of how to fund a campaign against him," Franklin said. "Between the money and his job approval, he looks awfully strong as a candidate."

One of the biggest obstacles preventing Walker from pursuing a presidential race is a Wisconsin Republican who has already run on the national ticket: Rep. Paul Ryan. The 2012 vice presidential nominee was warmly received Friday at the Faith and Freedom Coalition conference, while several people asked about Walker, who didn't attend, weren't familiar with him.

"He's not a known quantity," said Robert Lancia, a former Navy Chaplain from Rhode Island.

Even his own state, Walker ranked third -- behind Ryan and Marco Rubio -- in a poll of possible Republican presidential contenders by the Marquette University Law School. In national NBC News/Wall Street Journal surveys of Republicans, Ryan and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul are leading the pack, while Walker's lower favorability ratings tied him for last place with Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.

But there's a flip side to Walker's lower profile. By not serving in Washington, he can steer clear of the contentious debate over immigration reform raging on Capitol Hill. The legislation to allow millions of illegal immigrants to earn citizenship is unpopular with the conservative base and could hamstring Rubio, who is spearheading the bill in the Senate. "He is making me seriously nervous," said Lancia, who described himself as a former fan of the Florida senator. The conference of religious conservatives sat silently when ex-Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, another potential candidate for the White House, touted his support for the bill on Friday.

Bob Wood, the head of a major Washington lobbying firm who served as chief of staff to former Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson, said that Walker, a motorcycle-riding college dropout from the Midwest, is uniquely able to relate to ordinary voters. His proximity to Iowa, not to mention the seven years he claimed it as his home state, could also be an advantage in the caucus.

"The governor is getting things done and providing solutions while Washington is stuck in the mud," Wood said. "That would be a huge part of him separating himself apart."

A transcript:

We set up this program back in the weeks after '01. We briefed members of Congress, chairmen and ranking members of the intelligence committees. We did it in my office, in the West Wing. Mike Hayden come in, George Tenet, I was there, and we'd give them the layout of what we were doing and what we were learning from it.

Eventually we did it for the elected leadership of the Congress, both parties, both houses. So, we had senior officials in Congress and eventually, obviously, the FISA courts, who read into the program, knew what we were doing and had in effect signed off on it.

I once asked a collected group, the big nine in the spring of '04 in the briefing. First we briefed them and said, do you think we ought to continue the program? They said absolutely yes. Then we said, do you think we ought to come back to the Congress and get additional legislative authorization? They said absolutely not, it will leak. Those were the senior leaders in the Congress at the time.

Forget the Constitution that took effect in 1789. We're operating under a new theory. The need for Congressional authorization is now determined by "the big nine" in informal, off-the-record conversation with the vice president. Why hold hearings, participate in public debates, and take votes with representatives from all the states (in the Senate) and all the Congressional districts (in the House)? Instead, use the privileges extended to the intelligence oversight folks to co-opt them, so that they'll even mislead Americans on your behalf, like Senator Dianne Feinstein does. Then treat the co-opted group's judgment as though it's a legitimate stand-in for their colleagues, even if a minority of them express deep concern that authority is being abused.

This is an especially perverse outcome given the fact that the intelligence oversight committees were established to rein in past abuses by the executive branch but are now enabling more. Indeed, President Obama is playing a version of Cheney's game. Guess what, gents? The policies you maneuver into place aren't legitimate when the normal processes of American government are sidestepped. The Madisonian system can't work if we permit the president to subvert it.

Facing the possibility that President Obama might not win a second term, his administration accelerated work in the weeks before the election to develop explicit rules for the targeted killing of terrorists by unmanned drones, so that a new president would inherit clear standards and procedures, according to two administration officials.

Civil rights are on the nation's docket in a major way. Sometime this month, the U.S. Supreme Court will decide an important voting-rights case, Shelby County v. Holder, in addition to another case involving racial discrimination in higher education and two potentially landmark cases on gay marriage. By the end of June, the nation's civil-rights profile may look quite different.

In Shelby County, the justices are weighing whether the 1965 Voting Rights Act should continue to apply specially to designated regions of the country with ugly histories of racial discrimination. These regions, including the entire state of Alabama as well as eight other states and more than 60 counties, currently must seek "preclearance" from the Department of Justice for any changes to their voting laws and practices (changes can still be challenged after enactment). Officials in Shelby County, Alabama, say "times have changed," that Shelby County is no longer the cesspool of Jim Crow racism it once was, and so the high court should overturn the preclearance requirement, known in legal parlance as Section 5.

Despite the protestations of Shelby County and other jurisdictions, mountains of evidence show that there is little doubt that Section 5 is still needed, including in Shelby County. If anything, preclearance requirements should probably be extended to more parts of the country. Every election reveals new and deviously crafted efforts at voter suppression, from voter-ID laws to intimidation and long lines at the polls that by coincidence seem to afflict minority precincts more than others. Republican legislators in various states continue to push laws that will clearly have a disproportionate impact on minority voters. Section 5's preclearance has been a powerful disincentive against discrimination in elections that, sadly, is still very present today. If the Supreme Court guts Section 5 -- as voting-rights advocates fear will happen, given the Court's conservative majority -- the nation will be jumping off a cliff into unknown territory.

But it would be a mistake to think that, though many Republicans want to see Section 5 struck down, they oppose other sections of the Voting Rights Act. Quite the contrary: The GOP has found the VRA to be a great ally. It turns out the act, as traditionally applied, has helped the party win a great number of legislative races. It also has become a potent obstacle to the Democrats retaking the U.S. House of Representatives.

Beginning in the civil-rights era in the 1960s, the Republican Party -- the party of Lincoln -- became the loudest opponent of race-based remedies to discrimination, whether in school admissions, hiring, or minority representation. The Democrats, once the party of segregation (some people forget that segregationists George Wallace and Strom Thurmond were elected governors of Alabama and South Carolina, respectively, as Democrats) did a dramatic about-face in the 1960s and became the party of civil rights. Acting under the legal strength and moral authority of the Voting Rights Act, the Democrats led the charge to draw so-called "majority-minority districts" -- ones packed so full of minority voters that they usually resulted in electing a minority representative, as intended. The number of minority representatives jumped exponentially from the 1960s through the 1980s, with the number of black House members increasing from five to 24 by 1989.

But just in time for the redistricting in 1990, some enterprising Republicans began noticing a rather curious fact: The drawing of majority-minority districts not only elected more minorities, it also had the effect of bleeding minority voters out of all the surrounding districts. Given that minority voters were the most reliably Democratic voters, that made all of the neighboring districts more Republican. The black, Latino, and Asian representatives mostly were replacing white Democrats, and the increase in minority representation was coming at the expense of electing fewer Democrats. The Democrats had been tripped up by a classic Catch-22, as had minority voters: Even as legislatures were becoming more diverse, they were ironically becoming less friendly to the agenda of racial minorities.

Newt Gingrich embraced this strategy of drawing majority-minority districts for GOP advantage, as did the Bush Administration Justice Department prior to the 1991 redistricting, even as GOP activists like now-Chief Justice John Roberts campaigned against the VRA because they opposed any race-based remedies. The tipping point was the 1994 midterm elections, when the GOP captured the U.S. House of Representatives for the first time in 35 years and Gingrich because speaker. Many experts on both the left and the right, from The Nation's Ari Berman and prominent GOP election lawyer Ben Ginsberg (who spearheaded the 1991 effort to maximize the number of majority-minority districts), attribute the Republican success that year to the drawing of majority-minority districts; indeed, African-American membership in the House reached its highest level ever, at 40.

VRA districts undoubtedly played a role in the GOP takeover, but they were not the only factor, since Republicans made big gains that year in lots of places outside the South. But in the hardscrabble battles of the 50-50 nation, any advantage at all was embraced, and prominent Republicans like Ginsberg and Gingrich became the loudest proponents of drawing majority-minority districts. Many Republicans still promote this strategy today, and it's the only race-based remedy the GOP has supported in the modern era. The party has been more than willing to shelve its ideology when it suited their naked political interests.

So in Shelby County, many Republicans are trying to have their cake and eat it too. They want the Supreme Court to gut Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which prevents them from enacting various voter-suppression laws. But they want to preserve the other parts of the VRA that provide the legal impetus for drawing majority-minority districts. One can't help but admire their cleverness.

Meanwhile, it's only going to get worse for the Democrats. Not only has the drawing of majority-minority districts led to fewer elected Democrats, but today single-seat districts themselves have become a huge barrier to Democrats retaking the House. That's because shifting partisan demographics have left Democratic voters more geographically concentrated than Republican voters. The problem is easy to see in urban areas, where Democratic votes are heavily concentrated. Urban Democrat House members -- a large number of whom are minority -- win with huge majorities, but winning a district with 80 percent doesn't help the party gain any more seats than winning with 60 percent. It just bleeds more Democratic voters out of the surrounding districts.

Yet it's not just urban districts that reflect the tilted partisan landscape. Election simulations have shown that partisan demographics -- even more than the gerrymandering of district lines -- give the GOP a natural, built-in edge in a majority of House districts. Those simulations predict that in 2014 the GOP will maintain control of the House even if Democrats win the nationwide House vote by nearly 10 percentage points. This dynamic was illustrated in the 2012 election, when President Obama defeated Mitt Romney by nearly five million votes nationwide, but Romney's vote was more efficiently dispersed -- he won 226 House districts to Obama's 209. That means Democrats can win a House majority only if their candidates win numerous districts won by Romney, a steep uphill climb. This explains the oddity of 2012, when the Democrats won the most votes nationwide in House races but still ended up with a minority of seats.

Many analysts incorrectly blame this partisan tilt on the extreme gerrymandering of legislative districts for partisan advantage. While gerrymandering contributes a bit to this bias, its impact is marginal -- the big culprit is single-seat, winner-take-all districts themselves, combined with the over-concentration of Democratic voters. These partisan demographics have made it far easier for GOP map drawers in Georgia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere not only to pack Democratic voters into fewer districts but also to pick off many white Democratic House members and "racialize" the Democratic Party. In 1991, white Democrats held 81 of 133 House seats in the South, but today that number has dwindled to 18 out of 145. This is why some zealous GOP activists have mounted a campaign to award presidential electors by congressional districts instead of on a statewide basis. Doing so would have resulted in Romney winning the presidency, even though he lost the national popular vote by a sizable margin.

This Republican edge also exists in most state legislatures, and it has been consistent for decades. But it was masked by the previous success of Southern Democrats in conservative districts, which was a legacy of Jim Crow and of Democrats being the party of segregation. Today, it's like having a footrace in which one side (the Republicans) starts out 10 yards ahead of the other (the Democrats).

Democratic leaders have tried to address this asymmetrical battlefield by controlling redistricting wherever and whenever they can, but they've had decreasing success as these partisan demographics have become more deeply rooted into the political landscape. Unfortunately for the Democrats, this fundamental dilemma over majority-minority districts strikes at the heart of its identity as a political party. It's to the party's credit that it walked away from its segregationist past and became the party of civil rights, but in 2013 the reality is that majority-minority districts and the continued use of one-seat, winner-take-all districts have painted the Democrats into a corner.

The most mutually beneficial arrangement for the Democrats and racial minorities would be for the electoral system to evolve from the current single-seat blueprint to a multi-seat system elected by proportional representation. With proportional voting, parties win seats in proportion to their vote share -- in a five-seat district, a party winning 40 percent of the vote wins two seats instead of nothing, and a party with 60 percent of the vote wins three seats instead of everything.

That would allow minorities to win their fair share of representation without gerrymandering any districts, and to do so without hurting the electoral chances of other Democratic Party candidates. In the South, such a plan would elect more black and white Democrats; it also would enfranchise more minority voters, since in every southern state a majority of the state's black voters continue to live in white majority districts where they have little to no influence. A proportional system would make these voters influential no matter where they live.

Interestingly, the U.S. has not always used single-seat districts to elect House members. In 1967 the Democrats controlling Congress passed a law that mandated the use of single-seat districts for federal House races, both to prevent some recalcitrant southern Democrats from going to statewide winner-take-all elections to dilute the black vote and also as a way to facilitate the gerrymandering of majority-minority districts. Ironically, now it's that very same district-based system that is dragging the Democrats underwater. Passing a proportional representation method looks unlikely in the short term, but it can be done by mere statute without a constitutional change. Rep. Mel Watt, a North Carolina Democrat, introduced legislation to allow states this option not that long ago. Democrats could partially outfox the GOP by embracing Watt's approach and pushing for a "home-rule" option within the 50 states for the use of proportional systems in U.S. House races as a voting-rights remedy.

In the meantime, the GOP must be cackling with glee at the Democrats' dilemmas, even as Republicans champion more majority-minority districts while fighting against every other race-based remedy to historical discrimination. Politics is often like a game of chess -- a very down and dirty version -- and one can't help but conclude that the Republicans are outsmarting the Democrats in this gambit.

Ever since Republicans got clobbered in the last election, some have suggested they dial back some of their hard stances in the culture war. The College Republicans, for example, commissioned a study that concluded that young voters see the party as fusty and old-fashioned, and urged it to get with the times on issues such as gay marriage. America may not be keen on free love and abortion on demand, but neither are voters clamoring for a party that wants to restrict access to contraception and keep women out of the work force.

And yet Republican politicians do not seem to have gotten the message. On Wednesday, for example, the GOP-controlled House passed a bill out of committee to ban almost all abortions after 20 weeks.* The religious conservative faction, with its agenda of stopping gay marriage and banning abortion under all circumstances, appears as strong as ever.

For proof, you needed only pay a visit this week to a conference put on by the Faith and Freedom Coalition. Ironically, or defiantly, titled the "Road to Majority Conference," it attracted a star-studded line-up of GOP pols, from potential presidential candidates Rand Paul and Marco Rubio to rabble-rousers like Donald Trump and Sarah Palin. The Faith and Freedom Coalition is headed by Ralph Reed, who you may remember from his glory days with the Christian Coalition in the 1990s or the Abramoff scandal of the last decade; he was last seen, in 2012, assuring the evangelicals that their hard work was going to win the election for Mitt Romney. The group claims to have sent 23 million pieces of campaign mail last year.

Nonetheless, there was little anguish or self-doubt at this week's gathering. "Despite the disappointment of 2012, we're very optimistic about the future," FFC's executive director, Gary Marx, told the catered luncheon that opened the three-day conference. "We win elections when we emphasize pro-freedom, pro-family messages based on our founding principles. We lose when candidates fail to articulate that message."

If this was meant to imply that Romney lost because social conservatives weren't enthusiastic enough about him, there's little evidence that's the case. According to exit polls, white born-again Christians were 26 percent of the electorate in 2012 and 78 percent of them voted for Romney; in 2008, they were also 26 percent of the electorate, and 74 percent of them voted for John McCain. In 2004, George W. Bush won reelection with 78 percent of their vote, when they made up a slightly smaller portion of the electorate. The problem is not that evangelicals' political participation or devotion to the GOP is declining. It's that the gap between what they believe and what everyone else does is growing wider.

How the party moves forward will depend above all on whom it nominates in the next presidential election, so the speeches by Paul and Rubio were especially consequential. That both felt compelled to address the group and pander to its narrow interests was evidence of social conservatives' continuing intraparty clout: The Christian right has been so well organized for so long that other conservative factions, such as libertarians or the Tea Party, pose little threat to its dominance.

Both Paul and Rubio talked about the importance of protecting the unborn; neither mentioned gay marriage. But both also sought to extend the conservative agenda in new directions -- a sign that each would, as a presidential contender, seek to push his party's base out of its comfort zone.

For Paul, the issue is peace. "As Christians, we need to be wary of this doctrine of preemptive war," he said. He spoke at length about the persecution of Christians in various non-democratic regimes, and urged the revocation of U.S. aid to countries such as Egypt. Paul is not as strict an isolationist as his father, former Rep. Ron Paul, but nonetheless believes in a less aggressive foreign policy, a less intrusive security state, and less military spending.

Rubio's speech served as an implicit rebuttal of Paul. He argued that the U.S. must be prepared to intervene abroad. "Radical Islam threatens the peace and safety of the world," he said. "If America does not step up, who will?"

And yet Rubio is also working to take the GOP in a new direction, by aggressively pushing for bipartisan immigration reform. Though many conservative Christians support this idea, there is a vocal segment of the Republican base that does not. "The essence of our immigration policy is compassion," Rubio told the conference.

Social conservatives will continue to wield major power in the Republican Party by their sheer numbers and their dogged activism. After the luncheon, attendees grabbed packets and went to Capitol Hill to lobby their hometown representatives -- the type of very visible engagement that guarantees their voices will continue to be heard. The packets included directions to the offices of 45 senators and 234 members of Congress, and a set of talking points on important issues. One read, "We vehemently oppose amnesty and guaranteed paths to citizenship for illegal immigrants"; another, "Public polling overstates the support for same-sex marriage."

But if social conservatives are to be a constructive force as the party moves forward, their agenda must expand beyond the cramped and unpopular confines of anti-abortion absolutism and enforcing "traditional" marriage. Party leaders are trying to push them toward new priorities; their fortunes, and the party's, will hinge on whether they will succeed.

* Correction: An earlier version of this post stated that the bill would ban all abortions after 20 weeks. We regret the error.

Edward Snowden has so raised the hackles of members of Congress and political commentators, it's worth taking a minute to try to understand why. It can't just be his leaks -- no similar reaction greeted revelations by Thomas Drake and William Binney, two recent NSA whistle-blowers who also sought to publicize post-9/11 intelligence overreach. Snowden told South China Morning Post reporter Lana Lam, "I'm neither traitor nor hero. I'm an American." But there are many sorts of Americans, and not all of them like each other. Something about Snowden has set many people off -- and the sources of the irritation with him are worth spelling out as a way of trying to understand the political moment, and how it differs in particular from the environment that greeted the man to whom he's most been compared, Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg. This is not a comprehensive list, but one intended to elucidate some of what's at issue.

1. Leakers Are Often Treated as a Type of Snitch. The first and most obvious source of negative reaction has to do with what he did. (Duh.) The New York Times and Washington Post persuasively argue that Snowden cannot be guilty of treason -- as some have suggested -- since by revealing surveillance inside the Unites States (or even inside China) he is not aiding and abetting an enemy with whom we are formally at war. But he is guilty of violating basic human and workplace norms, in addition to his legally actionable promises as a person with top-secret clearance. From the gang-driven Stop Snitchin' campaign in Baltimore to professional cultural norms that ostracize people who publicly complain about their last employer or seek redress for discrimination, people have an instinctive cultural dislike of those seen as tattletales, even if what they have to say is accurate, important, and socially beneficial to disclose. This is why there are formal whistle-blower protections within the federal government and legal protections against retaliation in discrimination cases -- because there need to be, since the first instinct is always against them. So let's posit that Snowden begins his public life with this strike against him -- this inherent prejudice -- at the outset, in addition to the widely held prejudice against people who break laws, as he just openly did.

2. Snowden Lacks Stature and Insider Ties. Ellsberg had stature when he leaked the Pentagon Papers. As the Washington Post put it, "Ellsberg was a senior military analyst working at the Pentagon who had a direct role in drafting the Pentagon Papers." Meanwhile Snowden was, according to the Post, "a contractor who moved through a series of low-ranking jobs for the CIA and the NSA." 

Ellsberg was also deeply embedded in not just the Washington establishment but the national elite, having attended Michigan's prestigious Cranbrook School (Mitt Romney's high school, you may recall from campaign 2012), Harvard University, Cambridge University, a Marine Officers training program (followed by three years in the military in command positions), and was later a fellow at the prestigious Harvard Society of Fellows, as well as the recipient of a Ph.D. in economics from the university. At the Pentagon, he helped draft plans for the conduct of the Vietnam War, which he would later see up close working out of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, and worked on the Pentagon study of the history of the conflict in Vietnam published by the Times as the Pentagon Papers.

All of this meant that when he leaked the documents in 1971, Ellsberg had a thick web of social and professional relationships in the halls of power that helped shape perceptions of him and his actions, as well as a sophisticated historical understanding of what his act of civil disobedience meant and the political tradition in which he was acting. When he turned against the war, it was as a powerful insider joining his conscience to an existing upswell in public opinion.

Snowden, as a 29-year-old high-school drop-out with a GED who washed out of the military during training (he says, though no one has yet found evidence of this) and who spent much of his career overseas or off the U.S. mainland, has none of this -- no ties to the building of the programs he revealed, no ties in Washington, no pre-existing public presence on the American scene, no elite web of contacts and relationships. His turn against the state is the act of an outsider whose allegiances and personality are known to the media only through a handful of interviews.

3. Snowden Is Culturally Isolated. Ellsberg's actions came at a time when there was a robust social movement demanding change in the exact direction his revelations suggested U.S. policy go -- out of Vietnam. Without the anti-Vietnam War movement, it's arguable he would not have been as important a historical figure, or as daring.

There is no comparable movement to support Snowden, no major anti-surveillance marches on Washington or roiling college campuses, no public burning of Facebook logins and passwords. While there is a robust online libertarian movement concerned with surveillance and privacy issues, there is no force in American life at the present time arguing for change on this front with anything near the power and reach of the anti-Vietnam War movement.

David Brooks's recent column on Snowden says some things I don't agree with, but his take on Snowden as the ultimate bowling-alone figure is right on.

Though thoughtful, morally engaged and deeply committed to his beliefs, he appears to be a product of one of the more unfortunate trends of the age: the atomization of society, the loosening of social bonds, the apparently growing share of young men in their 20s who are living technological existences in the fuzzy land between their childhood institutions and adult family commitments.

If you live a life unshaped by the mediating institutions of civil society, perhaps it makes sense to see the world a certain way: Life is not embedded in a series of gently gradated authoritative structures: family, neighborhood, religious group, state, nation and world. Instead, it's just the solitary naked individual and the gigantic and menacing state.

This lens makes you more likely to share the distinct strands of libertarianism that are blossoming in this fragmenting age: the deep suspicion of authority, the strong belief that hierarchies and organizations are suspect, the fervent devotion to transparency, the assumption that individual preference should be supreme. 

The solitary individual vs. the gigantic and menacing state. "You can't come forward against the world's most powerful intelligence agencies and be completely free from risk because they're such powerful adversaries. No one can meaningfully oppose them," Snowden told The Guardian. I would argue that this worldview fundamentally fails to understand the way power works in America: Groups of people can stand up against the state in this free society and win, if they are willing to risk physical hardship together.

Even in the Guantanamo Bay prison -- perhaps the least American place run by Americans -- individuals who are being held indefinitely without trial are using collective action to protest their detention with a hunger strike that requires the state to brutally force feed more than 100 of them. This brutality has brought new attention to their plight and contributed to the president's decision -- along with changes in the political environment in Yemen -- to resume transfers of the prisoners to Yemen, the country of original of nearly half the remaining detainees. Collective action and the capacity to withstand suffering in service of a political aim works when the petitioned target is a free, democratically governed society, even when undertaken by people with very few legal rights. (The process often works exceedingly slowly, however.)

See also: the actions of the DREAMers, young people who outed themselves as undocumented and whose dare to the government to deport them helped bring about policy changes that are letting them stay in America, for now.

4. He's Warning of Theoretical Rather Than Actual Physical Harms. Ellsberg was seeking to stop a policy that was leading to American deaths during an era in which young men were drafted into combat, which is to say, subjected to a policy that theoretically made them all at risk of being killed. Snowden is warning against a possible future evil -- what he called "turn-key tyranny." That's a lot harder for people to get agitated about, because it is less direct and tangible, less physically threatening. We remain embodied creatures, despite the Internet, and much of our legal system reflects the reality that physical harms are graver offenses than non-physical ones.

So, too, with Snowden's warnings that the infrastructure of online surveillance could be used to crush dissent. Sure, surveillance of political dissidents -- something that has a history in America -- could theoretically be used to stifle dissent in the future. But the reality is that anyone involved in a protest movement already has to assume government monitoring -- either by local police (as with protesters planning to rally against the Republican Convention in Philadelphia in 2000, who learned after being arrested their group had been infiltrated by undercover police) or the feds (as with the Free Speech Movement activists in California in the 1960s, as detailed in Seth Rosenfeld's book Subversives). Meanwhile the biggest threats against activists are physical, not observational. Martin Luther King Jr. maybe have been taunted anonymously by an FBI that was bugging his rooms, but it was an assassin's bullet that stopped him. The Occupy encampments may have been monitored by the state (we can safely assume), but it was police in riot gear with pepper spray who uprooted their movement.

(And no, I am not comparing the two morally, just noting that knowledge of surveillance does much less to stop dissent in this country than does physical force or detention.)   
 
5. He Left America. My country, right or wrong. America -- love it or leave it. Snowden is on the wrong side of all the old conservative cliches, at once overestimating the power of its intelligence apparatus and underestimating his country's fealty to democratic oversight processes. The U.S. intelligence community, he warned reporter Barton Gellman, "will most certainly kill you if they think you are the single point of failure that could stop this disclosure and make them the sole owner of this information." This is an unimaginable accusation -- the U.S. government does not kill Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalists on American soil, and certainly does not do so to stop the disclosure of previously partially disclosed information. 

Outlandish assertions like this as well as conflict over Snowden's claims about the actual reach of the PRISM program -- direct access to servers to read the emails of all Americans or court-overseen transfer of files related to targeted persons of interest? -- create the suspicion he's a bit of an overseller. Meanwhile the fact that his disclosures have not been limited to the revelations about surveillance of American citizens undermines his contention he's acting to inform the American public, rather than international audiences, including those in China, where he has taken refuge. Leaving America is what someone who does not expect to be part of a collective change movement does, not the move of someone who wants to lead one.

6. The Majority Rules Here. Snowden's greatest foe on the home front is not his fantasy of an all-powerful national-security apparatus that kills even famous Americans willy-nilly to protect its secrets, but the nation's democratically elected representatives, who are now rallying against him.

Snowden's views on national security and surveillance are not well-represented among elected officials. Ron and Rand Paul are outliers. One tends most to see civil disobedience in such situations -- where there is a gap between intense minority sentiment and the views of the majority of elected officials. It's a kind of democratic failure and democratic success at the same time -- a process of self-correction, and one that is not easy.

7. What He Revealed Is Legal. "The difference between what the Bush administration was doing in 2001, right after 9/11, and what the Obama administration is doing today is that the system is now under the cover and color of law," whistleblower Thomas Drake wrote in The Guardian. This is not an insubstantial point.

That programs once conducted without legal basis have been modified and brought under the banner of the law just shows that the law can accommodate itself to changed circumstances. But it changes the tenor of the complaint.

8. The Politics of the War on Terror Encourage Maximalism. At the same time that we're having this conversation over Snowden's revelations about what has been created under the Patriot Act, Rep. Ed Markey is being attacked in his U.S. Senate bid for being "soft on national security" for having failed to support the Patriot Act strongly enough. All the incentives in the political system push politicians toward supporting maximalist stances on anti-terror policy. Any attack is an issue opponents will run on, a set of grieving families to comfort, an actual functional failure to keep the people safe.

9. The Most Tangible Threats to Privacy Do Not Come From the Government. "Why should people care about surveillance?" Glenn Greenwald asked Snowden. His reply:

Because even if you're not doing anything wrong you're being watched and recorded. And the storage capability of these systems increases every year consistently by orders of magnitude to where it's getting to the point where you don't have to have done anything wrong. You simply have to eventually fall under suspicion from somebody even by a wrong call. And then they can use this system to go back in time and scrutinize every decision you've ever made, every friend you've ever discussed something with. And attack you on that basis to sort to derive suspicion from an innocent life and paint anyone in the context of a wrongdoer.

You mean, by writing articles like "Edward Snowden's Online Past Revealed"? The reality is that for people who are not protesting some kind of government policy, the single greatest threat to privacy -- and even the originality and creativity Snowden has signaled he cares about -- comes from participation in online life and sharing photos and opinions with the world.

We have met the panopticon, and it is us: Most people already know that their information shared online is shared -- not in their control, not private. Their friends and neighbors control their images, people who object to how they behave may blog about them, there is a boom in private surveillance technologies used by spouses who suspect infidelity. The only reason there is private information for the government to ask for is because we have volunteered it already to corporate third parties.

For the last two years, Senators Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Mark Udall (D-Colo.) have tried to describe to the American public the sweeping surveillance the National Security Agency conducts inside and outside the United States. But secrecy rules block them from airing the simplest details.

Over the last few days, President Barack Obama and Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chairwoman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, have both said they welcome a national debate about the surveillance programs. But the president and senator have not used their power to declassify information that would make that debate possible.

"I flew over the World Trade Center going to Senator Lautenberg's funeral," Feinstein said this Sunday on ABC's "This Week," referring to New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg. "And I thought of those bodies jumping out of that building hitting the canopy. Part of our obligation is keeping America safe."

Feinstein is right, but our obsession with preventing terrorist attacks is warping our political debate and threatening basic rights. Edward Snowden's release of classified documents has exposed two destructive post-2001 dynamics: the rise of secrecy and contractors.

First, secrecy. In the initial years after September 11, the focus on thwarting another major domestic terrorist attack was understandable. Twelve years later, there have been only two major al Qaeda-inspired terrorist attacks inside the United States: the 2009 killing of 13 soldiers in Fort Hood, Texas, and the April Boston marathon bombing that killed three. No evidence has emerged of terrorist groups infiltrating American executive, intelligence or defense agencies.

Yet documents released by Snowden show that the amount of surveillance information that the government collects is ballooning. The American public has no clear sense of how the metadata is used by the government, how long it is held and which agencies have access to it.

The culture of secrecy that pervades Washington borders on the absurd. American officials say they cannot discuss "classified" U.S. counter-terrorism tactics that are well-known worldwide - from water-boarding to drone strikes to data mining.

The White House refuses to release the legal memo it used it used to justify the killing of an American citizen in a drone strike in Yemen. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court will not publish summaries of the rulings that made data mining legal. And Feinstein will not declassify a redacted version of her committee's 6,000 page report on the Bush administration's use of enhanced interrogation techniques.

From drone strikes to eavesdropping to torture, the American public is not allowed to know the rules and results of U.S. counterterrorism policies.

At the same time, a sprawling secrecy industrial complex does. More than 4.9 million Americans now have government security clearances. Another 1.4 million have "top secret" clearance.

As always, politics lies beneath the surface. For a Democratic or Republican president, another major terrorist attack in the United States would be politically devastating. Erring on the side of overzealous counterterrorism and under-zealous disclosure is smart politics.

But as Obama himself argued in a speech two weeks ago, the time has come for the United States to move forward. A "perpetual war," he said, "will prove self-defeating, and alter our country in troubling ways." So will perpetual fear and perpetual secrecy.

The post-2001 rise of private contractors like Snowden must end as well. Major U.S. civilian government agencies -- from the CIA to State Department -- have become dependent on contractors to operate.

Instead of increasing the size of government, the Bush administration made contractors a cornerstone of the American counterterrorism effort.

Today, the federal government pays contractors $300 billion a year, according to the Project on Government Oversight, a watchdog group. Many are believed to operate in intelligence agencies.

"The government workforce has pretty much stayed the same over the last 30 to 40 years," Scott Amey, the group's general counsel, told Reuters on Monday. "But we've supplemented that with a contractor workforce that has grown dramatically."

Contracting has become a huge profit center for defense contractors and Wall Street alike. Snowden's firm, Booz Allen, was purchased by the Carlyle Group in 2008. Last year, 99 percent of the Booz's $3.8 billion in revenue came from government contracts.

The rise of Booz and Carlyle is part of a broad, long-term shift of money, talent and authority from the public sector to the private sector. The National Security Agency, Central Intelligence Agency and Defense Intelligence Agency, for example, all rely heavily on contractors to operate. Roughly 480,000 -- one-third of the 1.4 million people with security clearances -- are contractors.

Neither government nor the private sector is perfect, but they function differently. Government is inherently cautious and bureaucratic. The private sector focuses on efficiency and speed. Wherever possible, secrets and core government functions should remain in the hands of government agencies, not for-profit companies.

Yes, certain details of our counterterrorism operations must remain secret. And our elected leaders may be telling the truth when they say the NSA's surveillance procedures are strictly limited. But our September 11-inspired culture of secrecy -- where terrorists lurk in every corner -- is overblown.

Redacted versions of FISA rulings, the Senate report on torture and descriptions of American drone strikes can be released without endangering our security.

Government's most feared powers -- from execution to imprisonment to spying on its citizens -- must be transparent and tightly controlled. Washington must answer to the public, not tell Americans it knows best.

When I first came to Washington in 1969, one of the first members of Congress I met and talked to was George Mahon, a courtly, laconic conservative Southern Democrat who happened to be chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. We talked about the committee and its traditions, and he said to me, "If you want to know anything and everything about appropriations, read the Fenno book."

Mahon was referring to the magisterial The Power of the Purse: Appropriations Politics in Congress, a political-science classic by Richard Fenno, the role model for all congressional scholars. The book tells the story of a powerful committee that did not fit the contemporary stereotype of a panel larded with members eager to open the floodgates of taxpayer dollars, to fund any and every boondoggle for the benefit of their own districts and those of their colleagues. Instead, Appropriations, from the chairmanships of Republican John Taber and Democrat Clarence Cannon through Mahon and on for decades thereafter, was carefully filled by party leaders with lawmakers of both parties who saw their role as guardians of the public purse, looking with a jaundiced eye on excessive spending and working together to provide tough oversight of government programs. The committee had well-established norms that rewarded diligence, fairness, and bipartisanship.

I thought of Mahon, and Fenno, last week as I watched David Price of North Carolina give an eloquent, anguished speech on the floor of the House as it debated the Homeland Security appropriations bill. Price had a distinguished career himself as a congressional scholar before he came to Congress, and he continues to write insightfully about Congress from the inside (ask him for the paper he wrote for a recent conference at Yale). More important, he is an institutionalist to his core, a longtime member of Appropriations who venerates a deliberative process, bipartisan cooperation and action, and regular order.

Why was Price so distraught? The Homeland Security Subcommittee, on which he is the ranking Democrat, had brought a balanced, sensible bill to the floor, crafted with the participation and cooperation of members on both sides, to protect our homeland within severe budget constraints. The work inside the subcommittee had been a model of how the process should work -- but for a second year in a row, its work was threatened by a poison-pill amendment offered by that poster boy for radical nihilism, Steve King of Iowa. The amendment blew up the Dream Act, taking away all discretion from the Department of Homeland Security to focus its deportation resources on criminals and miscreants and forcing the department to end any deferral in the deportation process that enables "dreamers" to stay in the United States.

By his own admission, King was trying to blow up any chance for a comprehensive immigration bill to pass the House. But the amendment was also a key test of whether the current Republican leaders of the House, and especially the members and leaders of the Appropriations Committee, valued this model of bipartisan deliberation and decision enough to keep its model bill intact.

They failed the test. Miserably. Not a single Republican on the Homeland Security Subcommittee voted against the poison-pill amendment. Only one Republican member of the full committee, freshman David Valadao of California, opposed it. No Republican member of the party leadership team opposed it. Committee Chairman Hal Rogers showed the opposite of leadership and proved he does not belong in the same category as Taber, Cannon, Mahon, Bill Natcher, Dave Obey, Bob Livingston, Bill Young, and others who cared about process and regular order, and the fierce independence and responsibility of the historic panel.

Rogers is actually a good guy, as are many of the committee members -- like Oklahoma's Tom Cole -- who failed the test. The only logical explanation is a frightening one: They are all intimidated by the more extreme and radical forces in their party. That the driving forces in today's GOP -- the ones who can say "Jump" and have the party leaders respond "How high?" -- are the likes of Steve King and Ted Cruz is deeply unsettling.

There is more. The new radical GOP has so embraced a slash-government-at-any-cost mentality that it is enthusiastic about the mindless across-the-board cuts known as the sequester, and is determined to slash all domestic discretionary programs even more deeply to meet the 10-year timetable in the balanced-budget framework of Paul Ryan. That includes programs that shape our homeland and national security, public safety, food safety, basic medical and scientific research, and much more.

As we focus on how a junior private contractor for Booz Allen Hamilton could gain access to and then leak the most sensitive intelligence information we have, keep this destructive mindset at the fore. Why have we privatized and subcontracted the lions' share of our national security intelligence apparatus? Because mindless budget cuts, a long-standing zeal to privatize reflexively, along with multiyear pay freezes for all civilian government employees and other efforts to undercut and demoralize those who work for government, have made it nearly impossible for government security agencies to compete with the private sector for top-flight electrical engineers and computer scientists. So we have turned to the back door, relying more and more on less-secure private contractors. This is the consequence of moving from a commendable focus on lean, efficient, and functional government in areas where we need it to an unthinking hatred of all government that is transcendent in the new GOP, and unchallenged by those who know better.

Naturally, this will feed the "return of the liberal hawks" meme that's spreading in some quarters .... To your humble blogger, this is simply the next iteration of the unspoken, brutally realpolitik policy towards Syria that's been going on for the past two years. To recap, the goal of that policy is to ensnare Iran and Hezbollah into a protracted, resource-draining civil war, with as minimal costs as possible.  This is exactly what the last two years have accomplished ... at an appalling toll in lives lost. This policy doesn't require any course correction ... so long as rebels are holding their own or winning. A faltering Assad simply forces Iran et al into doubling down and committing even more resources.  A faltering rebel movement, on the other hand, does require some external support, lest the Iranians actually win the conflict. 

In a related matter, arming the rebels also prevents relations with U.S. allies in the region from fraying any further. So is this the first step towards another U.S.-led war in the region? No. Everything in that Times story, and everything this administration has said and done for the past two years, screams deep reluctance over intervention. Arming the rebels is not the same thing as a no-fly zone or any kind of ground intervention. This is simply the United States engaging in its own form of asymmetric warfare. For the low, low price of aiding and arming the rebels, the U.S. preoccupies all of its adversaries in the Middle East. 

Without the widespread willingness to allow the executive to keep secret the mass of information about its own operations and intentions, it wouldn't have been possible for the executive to steal away so much power from the Congress and the public and to free itself from the kinds of checks and balances that were intended in the Constitution. Precisely because Congressmen realized over the years that they lacked the information on which to criticize Executive policy or to suggest changes, they have opted out from an active role in the field of foreign policy. But by the same token, it was the executive branch itself which was denying them this information. So that what we saw was one more confirmation of the axiom on which I think our Constitution was originally built, which is, "power corrupts -- even Americans."

Power encroaches upon the challenges of the opposition, and officials in the executive branch, given a chance to paralyze opposition by practicing secrecy and deception, will use that power.

The New York Times editorial board complains, "Except for a few leaders and members of the intelligence committees, most lawmakers did not know the government was collecting records on almost every phone call made in the United States or was able to collect anyone's e-mail messages and Internet chats." Further, it adds, "since the public did not know about the extent of the surveillance, it was in no position to bring popular pressure against elected representatives."

The nature of sensitive information, alas, is that it cannot be simultaneously shared with the American public and kept secret from those who mean us harm. If American lives are seriously at risk if information gets out, it seems perfectly reasonable to limit access. That's the reason information classification exists: to share it with only people who both have a demonstrated need to know and are believed, through a series of background checks of increasing rigor for more sensitive secrets, to be trustworthy. (Alas, as we've learned yet again, this vetting process is hardly foolproof.)

Who gets to decide what should remain secret? As I've argued elsewhere, while there's no perfectly satisfying answer, the most reasonable is those senior government officials who have been elected, appointed, and otherwise trained and entrusted to make those decisions. Most obviously, that includes the president, the defense secretary, and our senior intelligence officials.

That's an awful lot of power to entrust to one branch of government, so we have in place a system of checks and balances whereby the two other branches ensure secrecy is not abused and the Constitution is followed. While it's true that "the United States has the most expensive, elaborate, and multi-tiered intelligence oversight apparatus of any nation on Earth," there is serious reason to doubt the vigor with which these institutions are doing their job. There's very little resistance to intrusive programs if they're done in the name of public safety or fighting terrorists.

On the legislative side, Senator John McCain contends that members of Congressional intelligence committees have all been well-briefed. "We passed the Patriot Act. We passed specific provisions of the act that allowed for this program to take place, to be enacted in operation," McCain said. The degree to what members have been briefed is in dispute, but he surely right that Congress paved the way for this program and others in the frenzy following 9/11. But almost a dozen years have passed now and there's very little evidence that they're interested in taking any of that power back.

One legislator taking his oversight responsibilities seriously is Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat and member of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Back in March, he asked James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, "Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?" and was told, "No, sir."

Given that we've since learned that the NSA is collecting tons and tons of data on hundreds of millions of us, Clapper would appear to have lied. But, as Bill Clinton might say, it depends on what the meaning of "collect" is. In defense-intelligence circles it has for decades been understood that "Data acquired by electronic means is 'collected' only when it has been processed into intelligible form." But Wyden quite reasonably isn't buying that explanation.

Perhaps Clapper thought this was not a question he could answer truthfully in a public hearing. But, given that he had the question in advance, he could easily have communicated that concern to Wyden and to committee Chair Dianne Feinstein or Vice Chair Saxby Chambliss. It's conceivable that keeping even the rough outlines of the program secret is necessary. But Congress has a crucial role in deciding such things and, quite obviously, can't perform it without being properly informed.

Then again, it's not at all clear that an informed Congress -- or even informed intelligence committees -- would matter. We've seen time and again in the almost dozen years since the 9/11 attacks an almost bipartisan deference to the executive. Wyden is in a tiny minority; most at least publicly side with McCain, Feinstein and others who see these programs as critical to protecting the Republic.

And, certainly, the American people themselves seem predisposed to trade privacy and liberty for even the illusion of safety, as evidenced by what we'll put up with at airports and virtually every opinion poll on the subject. A solid majority (56 percent) in a Washington Post-Pew survey taken after the NSA story broke support the program and a whopping 62 percent "think [it] is more important right now for the federal government to investigate possible terrorist threats, even if that intrudes on personal privacy."

The judicial branch, meanwhile, has been a steady if slow check on some of the most egregious civil-liberties abuses. For example, Hamdi v. Rumsfeld (2004), Rasul v. Bush (2004), and Boumediene v. Bush (2008) reaffirmed the rights of due process for those accused by the executive of being enemy combatants.

At the same time, it's reasonable to wonder how effective a check the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has been. It "approved all 1,506 government requests to electronically monitor suspected 'agents' of a foreign power or terrorists on U.S. soil" in 2010 and "did not deny any applications in whole, or in part." Indeed, they've "declined just 11 of the more than 33,900 surveillance requests made by the government" between 1979 and 2012, an approval rate of 99.97 percent!

But the notion that they are a "rubber stamp" is overblown. While they operate in secrecy, making monitoring their activities next to impossible for those of us outside the system, the court is comprised of 11 U.S. District Court judges appointed by the chief justice of the Supreme Court for seven-year terms. They're real Article III judges, not cronies of the administration or the intelligence services.

The ACLU's Timothy Edgar argues that it's the professionalism of the requests that accounts for the high approval rate. The Justice Department lawyers who draft the requests are "very reluctant to get a denial" and therefore essentially act as in-house judges, seeing themselves "not as government advocates so much as neutral arbiters of the law between the executive branch and the courts" and therefore "getting the order approved by the Justice Department lawyers is perhaps the biggest hurdle to approval." Additionally, while the FISA judges almost never reject these requests, they do occasionally modify them.

It's worth noting, too, that the version of this program that started under the Bush Administration was done without bothering to consult the FISA Court, under the theory that the Patriot Act authorized the president to make the call unilaterally. And that Congress enthusiastically backed that move years after the fact once the news came out.

Then again, the law itself makes approval of these massive requests pretty easy. The metadata in question in this program does not require a high bar at all because our regular courts decades ago ruled that there was a very low expectation of privacy to the fact of conversations, even in ordinary criminal matters; it's only the content of the conversations that requires a high burden of proof.

Indeed, whether in matters of national security or even ordinary law enforcement, the courts have in recent decades bent over backwards to side with the executive branch's interests in protecting the public and its officers, interpreting the protections of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments and the right to privacy quite narrowly. On balance, the American public and its elected representatives approve.

Americans' civil liberties are almost certainly threatened more by plainly transparent actions of police officers and other government agents carrying out the War on Terror and the War on Drugs than from NSA computers scanning our phone logs. Until we start caring about these things, however, it's highly unlikely that our elected representatives will.

It doesn't really matter which modern presidential administration you decide to scrutinize for this behavior, as all of them are guilty. For instance, President George W. Bush's administration declassified or leaked whole barrels of intelligence, raw and otherwise, to convince the public and Congress making war on Iraq was a good idea. Bush himself ordered the release of classified prewar intelligence about Iraq through Vice President Dick Cheney and Chief of Staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby to New York Times reporter Judith Miller in July 2003. Sometimes the index finger of government has no idea of what the thumb is up to. In 2007, Vice President Cheney went directly to Bush with his complaint about what he considered to be a damaging national security leak in a column by the Washington Post's David Ignatius. "Whoever is leaking information like this to the press is doing a real disservice, Mr. President," Cheney said. Later, Bush's national security adviser paid a visit to Cheney to explain that Bush, um, had authorized him to make the leak to Ignatius.

In 2010, NBC News reporter Michael Isikoff detailed similar secrecy machinations by the Obama administration, which leaked to Bob Woodward "a wealth of eye-popping details from a highly classified briefing" to President-elect Barack Obama two days after the November 2008 election. Among the disclosures to appear in Woodward's book "Obama's Wars" were, Isikoff wrote, "the code names of previously unknown NSA programs, the existence of a clandestine paramilitary army run by the CIA in Afghanistan, and details of a secret Chinese cyberpenetration of Obama and John McCain campaign computers."

The secrets shared with Woodward were so delicate Obama transition chief John Podesta was barred from attendance ... Isikoff asked, quite logically, how the Obama administration could pursue a double standard in which it prosecuted mid-level bureaucrats and military officers for their leaks to the press but allowed administration officials to dispense bigger secrets to Woodward. The best answer Isikoff could find came from John Rizzo, a former CIA general counsel, who surmised that prosecutor leaks to Woodward would be damn-near impossible to prosecute if the president or the CIA director authorized them.

.... In 2012, as the presidential campaigns gathered speed, after the New York Times published stories about classified programs, including the "kill list," the drone program, details about the Osama bin Laden raid, and Stuxnet, all considered successes by the administration. The reports infuriated Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who essentially accused the Obama White House of leaking these top secrets for political gain. "This is not a game. This is far more important than mere politics. Laws have apparently been broken," McCain cried. To the best of my knowledge, no investigation of these alleged leaks to the press have been ordered or are active, and I have yet to hear Messrs. Brooks, Simon and Cohen describe these leakers of those details as self-indulgent, losers or narcissists.

The fear of terrorism isn't motivated solely by what terrorists have done, but what terrorists hope to do. Although it's true that bathtub accidents account for a too-large number of deaths, it isn't true that bathtubs are engaged in a conspiracy with other bathtubs to murder ever-larger numbers of Americans. We know for certain, however, that al-Qaeda, its offshoots, and other organizations and individuals in the Islamist orbit seek unconventional weapons that would allow them to kill a far-larger number of Americans than died on Sept. 11.

As early as 1998, Osama bin Laden asserted that Islam required him to use weapons of mass destruction in the conduct of his jihad, and he made the acquisition of these weapons a high priority. The al-Qaeda leader Sulaiman Abu Ghaith famously argued that Muslims had the right to "kill four million Americans, including one million children, displace double that figure, and injure and cripple hundreds and thousands." (For a fuller understanding of al-Qaeda's WMD ambitions, see this Rolf Mowatt-Larssen article in Foreign Policy.)

Is there anyone who actually believes that al-Qaeda or its offshoots would hesitate to use chemical or biological weapons against Western targets if they could? The only reason radical Islamists haven't used such weapons is that they haven't been able to acquire them -- mainly, I think, because of effective American countermeasures.

I don't think it's probable that Islamists will one day be able to launch a nonconventional attack on an American target. But I think it's plausible, and now that mass stockpiles of chemical weapons may be in flux in a highly unstable Syria, the likelihood that these weapons will fall into the hands of al-Qaeda-influenced organizations is going up, at least slightly.

There are other reasons that deaths from drowning or diabetes or lightning strikes aren't comparable to deaths caused by terrorism. Sustained terror campaigns against civilian targets do, whether Friedersdorf or I like it or not, undermine trust and openness across a society. They demand the adoption of security procedures that may be effective but are still onerous and debilitating.