Bush Republicans Condemn the RNC's Anti-Surveillance Resolution

They say the longer a political party is out of power, the more
libertarian its rhetoric gets. The Republican National Committee
followed that pattern last week when it
passed a resolution that “calls upon Republican lawmakers to
immediately take action to halt current unconstitutional
surveillance programs and provide a full public accounting of the
NSA’s data collection programs.” The resolution isn’t perfect—it
conflates two different NSA programs—but it’s a bracing document
that harshly (and rightly) rejects policies embraced not just by
Barack Obama but by George W. Bush.

The Bush Republicans are still around, though, and over the
weekend they fired back. In a letter sent on Saturday
(and published on
Sunday in The Daily Beast), Rep. Mike Pompeo and seven
Bush-era officials, including former attorney general Michael
Mukasey and former Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff,
offered this judgement:

This is not a Democratic or a Republican program.
Protecting Americans from terrorism should not be a partisan issue.
The program was first launched under President George W. Bush. It
was approved by Congressional leaders of both parties. And for good
reason. It helps to keep Americans safe.

Evidence is scarce that the program has helped keep Americans
safe, but the Bush octet is right about the politics: When the
members of the Republican National Committee condemned
unconstitutional NSA surveillance, they were condemning their own
party’s record. Good.

The Democrats went through something like this in the last
decade, when an insurgency within their ranks found that battling
Bush’s foreign policy meant fighting their party’s complicity with
his wars. It’s good to see similar stirrings on the right
today—though I can’t help recalling that the Dems’ aversion to
meddling in the Middle East faded pretty quickly once they retook
the White House. Power has ways to absorb opposition.