Literally less than 72 hours after being sworn in in January 2009, Barack Obama was in federal court arguing he had the right to spy on us. 

Did you know that? 

Perhaps you did and you forgot. Seemed a worthwhile thing to bring up in light of all we’ve learned these last several years. And in case anyone hasn’t read it recently, let’s refresh our memories on what we’ve lost:

The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. 

But back to the matter at hand:  In January 2008, and throughout his entire presidential campaign, then-Sen. Barack Obama was objectively consistent:  “Wiretaps without warrants” = bad.  

“...Under an Obama presidency, Americans will be able to leave behind the era of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and ‘wiretaps without warrants.’"

He could not have been more clear, nor could the headline from CNET:

“Obama: No Warrantless Wiretaps if You Elect Me” 

If you recall, there was quite the brouhaha about library book privacy.  Remember?  We were so innocent back then … just 16 years ago. Obama campaigned on it. Privacy matters. Your ability to be secure in your “papers” mattered, intoned the “Constitutional law” “professor.”  Month after month after month ...

Until he was sworn in on Jan. 20, 2009.

Then, like a sore on your privates after a one night stand, it appeared; on the morning of Jan. 23, 2009, Obama’s freshly-minted DOJ was in federal court saying the exact opposite. “Wiretaps without warrants” = GOOD. Gotta love the Wired headline:  Obama Sides with Bush in Spy Case.  Literally less than 72 hours after having his hand on the Bible.

“...Weighing [in on] whether a U.S. president may bypass Congress and establish a program of eavesdropping on Americans without warrants... the Obama administration... ask[ed] the courts to rule on [its] constitutionality…”

Obama was sworn in at noon on January 20.  The brief was filed at 10:30 a.m. on January 23.  Half of D.C. was still hung over from all the inauguration parties at that point.  (The other half was still drunk.)  And the entire media, ideologically drunk on The One being “immaculated" (h/t Rush Limbaugh, R.I.P.) in the White House, just breezed right by it, their cognitive dissonance combined with being pickled was just too much.

But then a remarkable thing happened on the way to the O’Promised Land … it got worse.  Much, much worse.

As Sundance at The Conservative Treehouse has rightly observed on many occasions, the George W. Bush presidency formalized the spying-on-us-all architecture post 9/11 with the Patriot Act, but it was the Barack H. Obama presidency which injected and animated the progressive virus to weaponize it against the regime’s enemies … and the viral particles, like viral particles do, have mutated and multiplied.  They say “personnel is policy”? Well, Obama planted thousands of his ideological allies throughout every agency then made them nearly impossible to fire, and the Biden regime is, even as we speak, installing mechanisms to make them even more impervious to dismissal should, God forbid (to them!), Trump win this November’s election.

If there’s anything we’ve learned from these people, it’s that they never sleep.  Progressivism is ideological herpes: once you get it, you can never get rid of it.  Oh, you can treat the symptoms of it, hope for fewer outbreaks, but outright kill it?  Oh no, it never dies.  It remains, waiting…

Should this November’s election turn out to be “too big to rig” (as Trump is fond of saying), we can only hope his DOJ is in federal court just as expeditiously in January 2025 to begin to suffocate that federal virus as much as humanly possible.  Our nation’s health, our Liberty, depends on it.

Image: Ari Levinson, via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 3.0