Via Sullivan, Julian Sanchez has a piece in the L.A. Times which points out that the real danger of warrantless wiretapping isn’t that it will be used to repress innocent, average Americans - but that those who hold the reins of power will be unable to resist the temptation to use it against political opponents and other political “extremists”:

Harvard University legal scholar William Stuntz has argued that the framers of the Constitution viewed the 4th Amendment as a mechanism for protecting political dissent. In England, agents of the crown had ransacked the homes of pamphleteers critical of the king — something the founders resolved that the American system would not countenance.

In that light, the security-versus-privacy framing of the contemporary FISA debate seems oddly incomplete. Your personal phone calls and e-mails may be of limited interest to the spymasters of Langley and Ft. Meade. But if you think an executive branch unchecked by courts won’t turn its “national security” surveillance powers to political ends — well, it would be a first.

Conservatives rarely object to this because as things stand now - they have little problem turning the “national security” surveillance powers on the likes of Cindy Sheehan or Code Pink, whom they see as un-American and perhaps even a security threat.

But one of the hallmarks of modern conservatism is its inability to look 10 years down the road, or its disinterest in doing so. As we’ve asked time and again: What happens if or when a President Hillary and a Democratic Congress get hold of these broad new, legally defined surveillance powers?

What if it’s not Code Pink who’s being watched - but posters to right-wing blogs like Little Green Footballs? Or those who donate to John Hagee’s church?

What Wright suggests, and I think he’s absolutely right, is that if Republicans (and weak-kneed Democrats) permit this now, the authority will be abused - not just by Republicans, but also by Democrats. It will be used against conservatives. And the rationale offered for public consumption will sound entirely plausible. It’s a simple matter to portray conservatives as wild-eyed extremists - just as it’s easy to do the same to liberals.

As an aside, though: Since when did conservatives become so trusting of government? The crowd who wants term limits because politicians can’t be trusted in office beyond a certain point really want to give this kind of authority to government - when in fact our founding documents were predicated on the belief that they shouldn’t have it, that - as Sanchez notes - loyalists then would have made the exact same arguments conservatives make now?

So the moral of the story is, I suppose, that politicians aren’t to be trusted - unless they are. Smaller government is good, unless we decide big government is better, in which case government can never have too much power - so long as we’re clear on what the definition of “enemy” is.