It's clear that a good number of activists who were not terribly bothered by President George W. Bush's post-9/11 civil liberties abuses are less comfortable with President Barack Obama's. Most of this is simple partisanship, and I don't think partisanship is interesting enough to discuss, but I do see one factor that makes Obama's civil liberties abuses potentially more dangerous than Bush's, and that will no doubt make the next president's civil liberties abuses more dangerous than Obama's: the state of technology.

Take the anti-drone argument, for example. There's nothing we're saying about drone strikes in the Obama administration that wasn't equally true of cruise missile strikes in the Clinton and Bush administrations, but there's something about the idea of drones that's vaguely unsettling for those of us who remember The Terminator, RoboCop, and other robotics-based dystopias. The same is largely true of the recent NSA scandal. In practice, this is Spygate redux - but it's being done better, thanks to technological advances we've seen over the past six years, and that's reason enough for civil libertarians to get nervous and buy up another printing of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. This is all independent, of course, from the Tea Party's tendency to see Bush-era civil liberties abuses in a more sinister light when they're carried over to Obama. What I'm telling conservatives right now is the very same thing I told liberals in 2007:

...(J)ust as the solution to monarchy is representative government, not better kings, the solution to an overreaching executive is checks and balances, not just a different executive. An ideal scenario, to my vantage point, would be to revise the Constitution to permanently reduce the power of the president to a level comparable to that of a prime minister. The strong-executive model places entirely too much power in the hands of one person, and I would love to see it revised and replaced with a more parliamentary model that gives citizens and their elected representatives more control over the government's decisionmaking progress. Certainly, at the very least, the president's authority to wage war without congressional approval needs to be curtailed.

But those changes are unlikely because presidential candidates of both parties oppose them, so I'll settle for the next best thing: Not expanding the unwieldy power of the presidency even more. To that extent, I need to oppose--and we all need to oppose--the line-item veto, which gives the president unparalleled power to intervene in the legislative process, unbalancing legislative compromises and creating more unfunded mandates.

It was true of Clinton, it was true of Bush, it's true of Obama, and it will no doubt be true of his successor: the imperial presidency is a problem created by the presidency, not the person who happens to occupy that office at the time. Electing a perfect president, even if such a candidate exists, would only solve the problem for - at most - 8 years. What we really need is a longer-term, policy-focused solution.

Reader Allison S. took issue with my "Is Abortion Murder?" piece. Since most of the people who write me about this article take it in a completely different direction than the one I'd intended, I asked her permission to reprint it--and respond to it--here. Read More...

New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg has strong words for the New York Civil Liberties Union and other civil rights activists who are concerned about racial profiling by the NYPD. He said in part:

The attacks most often come from people who play no constructive role in keeping our city safe, but rather view their jobs as pointing fingers from the steps of City Hall. Some of them scream that they know better than you how to run the department. Some have even sued the NYPD and demanded a federal monitor over NYPD operations. They've also drafted politically driven legislation that is a reaction to two NYPD practices: Stop, Question and Frisk; and counter-terrorism intelligence gathering.

 

Criticism of the NYPD has increased in recent weeks following the suspicious NYPD shooting death of 16-year-old Kimani Gray, whose family and supporters are still calling for a full investigation.

Related: A Short History of Racial Profiling in the United States

If we look at relevant precedents and follow them to their logical conclusions, the Supreme Court has already legalized same-sex marriage on a national level. Whether they have the political will to acknowledge this is, of course, another question entirely.

Let's follow this step by step:

1. We know that marriage is a civil right because the Supreme Court said so in Loving v. Virginia (1967), the ruling that outlawed bans on interracial marriage.
2. We know that lesbians and gay men are protected by the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, because the Supreme Court said so in Lawrence v. Texas (2003).
3. We know that the federal government, and states, are prohibited from depriving any identifiable group of their civil rights under the equal protection clause.

Justice Scalia is fond of saying that the equal protection clause deals only with race, but it never even mentions race; justices who weave that limitation into the amendment out of whole cloth are interrupting the amendment, not interpreting it. It applies to racial discrimination, of course--because that is, by definition, a violation of equal protection--but that's not what the text of the amendment addresses.

So it's simple, really: the Supreme Court has already implicitly said that states may not ban same-sex marriage. What is needed, now, is for five or more justices to stand by what the Court has already said--a considerable test of their political courage, to be sure, but not much of an intellectual challenge. That work has already long since been done.

Related: What is Marriage? | Four Arguments in Favor of Same-Sex Marriage