This week, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s unprecedented landslide loss to David Brat in their Republican primary contest sent a shockwave through Washington. While observers have suggested that the surprising upset reflected his stance on a variety of issues, BORDC has joined outlets including The Hill and others who observed that Brat sharply distinguished himself from Cantor on civil liberties.
For instance, Brat told the Richmond Times-Dispatch that the NSA dragnet ”is a disturbing violation of our Fourth Amendment right to privacy,” and on his campaign website, he addresses several civil liberties at once:
The federal government’s abuse of our freedoms has spun out of control. Whether it is the NSA violating our 4th Amendment Rights by collecting phone records, the IRS violating our 1st Amendment rights by targeting conservative organizations, or President Obama violating our 5th Amendment rights with the indefinite detention of American citizens, our freedoms have been under attack and they must be restored.
Yesterday, the Institute for Public Accuracy quoted BORDC’s Shahid Buttar, who explained that:
For too long, politicians in Washington have blithely ignored their constitutional duties while deferring to executive agencies engaged in a frontal assault on the individual rights guaranteed by our nation’s founders. Eric Cantor’s primary loss to a relatively unknown candidate reflects, at least in part, a transpartisan grassroots rejection of the NSA spying programs that Cantor has staunchly defended.
Given his role in the Republican leadership, he was responsible in part for the behind the scenes, closed-door process that recently gutted the USA FREEDOM Act, and he has long been part of the culture of congressional corruption that continued to defer to executive agencies despite their long-standing and ongoing crimes against the American people.…
Republicans are not the only ones who should take heed: plenty of Democrats are complicit in the crimes of U.S. intelligence agencies, and will risk similar upsets until they start demonstrating independence from the executive branch they are charged to oversee, check, and balance.
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