Finally, Bush’s last year

The question began to pop up early, maybe in 2005, on bumper stickers and T-shirts and various items offered on liberal Web sites: Is it 2008 yet?

The question, so thin and forlorn at the beginning, has become ever more pressing since. Back in 2005, it was hard to imagine that we would enter 2008 discussing these particular news stories:

Congressional outrage over the CIA destroying tapes of interrogations, despite explicit instructions – and laws – saying it shouldn’t do so. People presumably in charge of the CIA – like the agency director at the time, and the president – insist they had nothing to do with the decision.

The concern isn’t, of course, about the tapes, which hardly anyone would have had the security clearance to see. The concern is about the widespread certainty that the tapes showed American agents doing things that just about anyone would describe as torture, despite solemn insistences that the United States doesn’t torture people.

Of course, back in 2005 we wouldn’t have imagined ourselves in an extended national discussion over waterboarding – forcing water into a prisoner’s lungs to make him think he’s drowning – which Sen. John McCain points out has been considered torture for centuries, but on which our new attorney general told senators he didn’t have any real legal clarity.

(That was an advance over Sen. Christopher Bond, R-Mo., who said on national television about waterboarding, “There are different ways of doing it. It’s like swimming, freestyle, backstroke.”)

Or that after the administration spent a year failing to defeat the McCain amendment banning cruel or degrading treatment, the White House would respond to the amendment’s becoming law with a signing statement declaring, “The executive branch shall construe (the law) in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President … as Commander in Chief.”

In other words, glub, glub.

In 2005, Americans thought Attorney General John Ashcroft had been uniquely dangerous to civil liberties. Since then, we’ve learned that compared to his successor, Alberto Gonzales, Ashcroft was an ACLU poster boy. In fact, we learned that after Justice Department lawyers had refused to approve White House demands for extended warrantless surveillance, Gonzales went to Ashcroft’s hospital room to get him to overrule his lawyers, and Ashcroft threw him out.

It turned out Ashcroft was more constitutionally sensitive while under sedation than Gonzales was while fully alert. Of course, we don’t know exactly the extent of his alertness, since Gonzales repeatedly told Congress he doesn’t remember much about his time as attorney general – a state of grace that the rest of us can only envy.

But only in the past two years did we learn how extensively the administration has viewed its authority to listen in on Americans’ phone conversations, notably conversations with one party out of the country – despite the requirements of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Entering 2008, the Senate is tied up over the renewal of FISA. There’s some question about when, if the law says you need a court order to tap a telephone, you actually need a court order to tap a telephone. The legislation, which the White House says is vital for our protection, is being held up largely by the administration’s insistence that it include immunity for telephone companies that seem to have illegally provided the government with information about their customers.

Of course, if the White House doesn’t get what it wants from Congress, it can always issue a quiet signing statement that it’s not actually bound by any laws it doesn’t like. Since 2005, we’ve learned from the Boston Globe’s Charlie Savage, the Bush White House has issued hundreds of these, declaring its immunity from any legislation that might be in its way.

Since the time when Americans began asking bleakly if it was 2008 yet, all kinds of news has intensified interest in the calendar. So now there’s a revised question, adjusted for the New Year and for all the things that have happened – or been revealed – since the initial question first came up:

It’s 2008.

Do you know where your government is?