Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
1NC
The President of the United States, through executive order,
should publicly declare that domestic drone surveillance will
no longer be carried out without a warrant. The President of
the United Stats should comply with this declaration.
Solves the case and avoids politics
Cooper-prof public administration Portland State- 2 [Phillip, By Order of the
President: The Use and Abuse of Executive Direct Action p.59
Executive orders are often used because they are quick, convenient, and
relatively easy mechanisms for moving significant policy initiatives. Though
itis certainly true that executive orders are employed for symbolic purposes, enough
has been said by now to demonstrate that they are also used for serious policymaking or to
lay the basis for important actions to be taken by executive branch agencies under the
authority of the orders. Unfortunately, as is true of legislation, it is not always possible to know from the title of
orders which are significant and which are not, particularly since presidents will often use an existing order as a
The relative
ease of the use of an order does not merely arise from the fact that p residents may
employ one to avoid the cumbersome and time consuming legislative
process. They may also use this device to avoid some times equally time-consuming administrative
base for action and then change it in ways that make it far more significant than its predecessors.
procedures, particularly the rulemaking processes required by the Administrative Procedure Act.84 Because those
procedural requirements do not apply to the president, it is tempting for executive branch agencies to seek
assistance from the White House to enact by executive order that which might be difficult for the agency itself to
there is the added plus from the agency's perspective that it can
be considerably more difficult for potential adversaries to obtain standing to
launch a legal challenge to the president's order than it is to move an agency
rule to judicial review. There is nothing new about the practice of generating executive orders outside the
move through the process. Moreover,
White House. President Kennedy's executive order on that process specifically provides for orders generated
elsewhere.
2NC Solvency
Executive orders solves for policymakingthats Cooperits
an easy solution to initiate reforms
Obama executive order can solve drone surveillance issues
solves and avoids the presidential powers link
Craig Whitlock, 9-26-2014, White House plans to require federal agencies to
provide details about the drones they fly," Washington Post,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/white-house-plans-torequire-federal-agencies-to-provide-details-about-drones/2014/09/26/5f55ac244581-11e4-b47c-f5889e061e5f_story.html, Accessed: 5-28-2015, /Bingham-MB
The White House is preparing a directive that would require federal agencies to
publicly disclose for the first time where they fly drones in the United States and
what they do with the torrents of data collected from aerial surveillance. The
presidential executive order would force the Pentagon, the Justice
Department, the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies to reveal
more details about the size and surveillance capabilities of their growing drone
fleets information that until now has been largely kept under wraps. The mandate
would apply only to federal drone flights in U.S. airspace. Overseas military and intelligence operations would not
be covered. President Obama has yet to sign the executive order, but officials said that drafts have been distributed
to federal agencies and that the process is in its final stages. An interagency review of the issue is underway, said
operations and surveillance policies. Much of what has emerged was obtained under court order as a result of
public-records lawsuits. Were undergoing a quiet revolution in aerial surveillance, said Chris Calabrese, legislative
counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. But we havent had all in one place a clear picture of how this
technology is being used. Nor is it clear that the agencies themselves know how it is being used. Most affected by
the executive order would be the Pentagon, which conducts drone training missions in most states, and Homeland
Security, which flies surveillance drones along the nations borders round-the-clock. It would also cover other
agencies with little-known drone programs, including NASA, the Interior Department and the Commerce
Department. Military and law enforcement agencies would not have to reveal sensitive operations. But they would
have to post basic information about their privacy safeguards for the vast amount of full-motion video and other
imagery collected by drones. Until now, the armed forces and federal law enforcement agencies have been
reflexively secretive about drone flights and even less forthcoming about how often they use the aircraft to conduct
domestic surveillance. Security officials are generally reluctant to disclose operational methods and techniques. But
drones are in a special category of sensitivity, given the top-secret role theyve long played in CIA and military
counterterrorism missions. Theres also evidence that federal agencies simply have been unable to develop internal
guidelines and policies quickly enough to keep up with rapid advances in drone technology. Federal use of drones
has gone way up, but its hard to document how much, said Jennifer Lynch, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier
Foundation, a San Francisco-based group that has sued the Federal Aviation Administration for records on
government drone operations. Its been incredibly difficult. Even Congress has struggled to uncover the extent to
which the federal government uses drones as a surveillance tool in U.S. airspace. In March 2013, lawmakers
directed the Defense Department to produce a report, within 90 days, describing its policies for sharing drone
surveillance imagery with law enforcement agencies. Eighteen months later, the Pentagon still has not completed
the report. Air Force Lt. Col. Thomas Crosson, a Defense Department spokesman, said officials hoped to provide an
interim response next week and a full version in the coming months. Department of Justice officials have also
been reluctant to answer queries from lawmakers about their drone operations. The FBI first disclosed its use of
small, unarmed surveillance drones to Congress in June 2013 and subsequently revealed that it had been flying
them since 2006. The Justice Department inspector general reported last fall that the FBI had not developed new
privacy guidelines for its drone surveillance and was relying instead on old rules for collecting imagery from regular
aircraft. Since then, Justice officials have said they are reviewing their drone surveillance policies but have not
disclosed any results. An FBI spokesman did not respond to a request for comment. The FBI has resisted other
attempts to divulge details about the size of its drone fleet and its surveillance practices. Citizens for Responsibility
and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a nonprofit group that pushes for transparency in government, sued the FBI last
year under the Freedom of Information Act for records on its drone program. Although the FBI has turned over
thousands of pages of documents, many have been redacted or provide only limited insights. Theyve been
dragging their feet from the outset, and its been enormously frustrating, said Anne Weismann, CREWs chief
counsel. I dont know if its because they dont want to expose the fact that theyve been operating without any
United States.
Posner and Vermeule 2010 [Eric A. , Professor of Law at the University of Chicago
Law School and Editor of The Journal of Legal Studies; Adrian , Harvard Law Professor, The
2012 elections, history will record instead that his administration pushed into new frontiers of war, most especially
in the new class of technologies that move the human role both geographically and chronologically further from the
point of action on the battlefield. The U.S. militarys unmanned systems, popularly known as drones, now number
more than 8,000 in the air and 12,000 on the ground. And in a parallel development, the U.S. Cyber Command,
which became operational in 2010, has added an array of new (and controversial) responsibilities and is set to
quintuple in size. This is not just a military matter. American intelligence agencies are increasingly using these
technologies as the tips of the spear in a series of so-called shadow wars. These include not only the more than
400 drone strikes that have taken place from Pakistan to Yemen, but also the deployment of the Stuxnet computer
virus to sabotage Iranian nuclear development, the worlds first known use of a specially designed cyber weapon.
the administration has tried to have it both ways leaking out success stories
use of these new technologies but not tying its hands with official statements
and set policies. This made great sense at first, when much of what was happening was ad hoc and being
fleshed out as it went along. But that position has become unsustainable. The less the U.S. government
now says about our policies, the more that vacuum is becoming filled by others, in harmful
ways. By acting but barely explaining our actions, were creating precedents for other states to
exploit. More than 75 countries now have military robotics programs, while another 20 have advanced cyber war
Throughout this period,
of our growing
capacities. Rest assured that nations like Iran, Russia and China will use these technologies in far more crude and
indiscriminate ways yet will do so while claiming to be merely following U.S. footsteps. In turn, international
organizations the UN among them are pushing ahead with special investigations into potential war crimes and
proposing new treaties. Our leaders, meanwhile, stay mum, which isolates the U.S. and drains its soft power. The
current policy also makes it harder to respond to growing concerns over civilian casualties. Indeed, Pew polling
found 96% levels of opposition to U.S. drones in the key battleground state of Pakistan, a bellwether of the entire
region. It is indisputable than many civilians have been harmed over the course of hundreds of strikes. And yet it is
point, with growing numbers in the not sure category and growing worries around cases of targeting U.S. citizens
abroad who are suspected of being terrorists. The administration is so boxed in that, even when it recently won a
court case to maintain the veil of semi-silence that surrounds the drone strike program, the judge described the
current policy as having an Alice in Wonderland feel. The White House seems to be finally starting to realize the
Eisenhower were able keep secret aspects of the development of nuclear weapons, even as they articulated how
if only he would finally make it. After all, the new weapons have worked. They have offered new options for
military action that are more accurate and proportionate and less risky than previously available methods. But they
have also posed many new complications. Explaining our position is about embracing both the good and the bad. It
is about acknowledging the harms that come with war regardless of what technology is being used and making
signature strikes, where the identity is not firmly identified, and double tap strikes, where rescuers aiding
victims of a first attack are also brought under fire. These have been reported as occurring and yet seem to run
these new technologies? Is current U.S. and international law sufficient to cover them? There are also crucial
executive management questions, like where to draw the dividing line between military and civilian intelligence
agency use of such technologies, and how to keep a growing range of covert actions from morphing into undeclared
create the effect of war but no U.S. personnel are ever sent in harms way. Given the sprawling complexity of these
matters, only the President can deliver an official statement on where we stand . If only
we somehow had a commander in chief who was simultaneously a law professor and Nobel Peace Prize winner!
The Presidents voice on these issues wont be a cure-all. But it will lay down a powerful
marker, shaping not just the next four years but the actions of future administrations.
that different executive officials have different motivations. Not all presidents are power maximizers or empirebuilders.20 Of course, the executive need not be pure of heart; his devotion to the public interest may in turn be
based on concern for the judgment of history. But so long as that motivation makes him a faithful agent of the
principal(s), he counts as well-motivated. The problem, however, is that the public has no simple way to know which
type of executive it is dealing with. An ill-motivated executive will just mimic the statements of a well-motivated
one, saying the right things and offering plausible rationales for policies that outsiders, lacking crucial information,
find difficult to evaluatepolicies that turn out not to be in the public interest. The ability of the ill-motivated
executive to mimic the public-spirited executive's statements gives rise to the executive's dilemma of credibility:
and thus does not serve its interest. Scholars of presidentialism have
addressed credibility problems in general and anecdotal terms,23 but without providing social-scientific
continues for lack of a better option. It is largely on account of having given up the argument over legitimacy, after all, that it never occurred to the
already been made against Israeli officials involved in targeted killing against Hamas in the Gaza war. Unsavory members of the U.N. act alongside the
worlds most fatuously self-regarding human rights groups to press for war crimes prosecutions. All of this is merely an opening move in a larger campaign
to stigmatize and delegitimize targeted killing and drone attacks. What can be done to Israelis can eventually be done to CIA officers. Perhaps a London
bookmaker can offer odds on how soon after the Obama administration leaves office CIA officers will be investigated by a court, somewhere, on grounds
related to targeted killing and Predator drone strikes. And whether the Obama administrations senior lawyers will rise to their defenseor, alternatively,
York University, is a measured professional and no ideologue, and he treads delicately with respect to the Obama administrationbut he treads. Likewise
it matters when, in mid-January, the ACLU handed the U.S. government a lengthy FOIA request seeking extensive information on every aspect of targeted
killing through the use of UAVs. The FOIA request emphasizes the legal justification for the program as conducted by the U.S. military and the CIA. Legal
justification matters, partly for reasons of legitimacy and partly because the United States is, and wants to be, a polity governed by law. This includes
international law, at least insofar as it means something other than the opinions of professors and motley member-states at the U.N. seeking to extract
concessions. International law, it is classically said, consists of what states consent to by treaty. Add to this customary lawas evidenced by how states
actually behave and as provided in their statements, their so-called opinio juris. Customary law is evidenced when states do these things because they
see them as binding obligations of law, done from a sense of legal obligationnot merely habit, policy, or convenience, practices that they might change
consistently reiterated views of international law, particularly in the field of international security, can be
dismissed out of hand. It is true of the United States and it is also true of China. It is not a matter of good Great Powers or bad. Nor
is it merely might makes right. It is, rather, a mechanism that keeps international law grounded in reality, and not a plaything of utopian experts and
enthusiasts, departing this earth for the City of God. It remains tethered to the real world both as law and practice, conditioned by how states see and act
The venerable U.S. view of the law of nations is one of moderate moral realism the
world as it is , as the president correctly put it in his Nobel Prize address. It is not the vision of radical utopians and
idealists; neither is it that of radical skeptics about the very existence of law in international
affairs. On the contrary, the time-honored American view has always been pragmatic about international law (thereby acting to preserve it from
on the law.
radical internationalism and radical skepticism). But upholding the American view requires more than simply dangling the inference that if the United
The U.S.
government should provide an affirmative, aggressive, and uncompromising
defense of the legal sense and sensibility of targeted killing. The U.S. governments
interlocutors and critics are not wrong to demand one , even those whose own conclusions have long since been set in stone. A
clear statement of legal position need not be an invitation to negotiate or alter it,
even when others loudly disagree. In international law, a states assertion that its
policies are lawful, particularly such an assertion from a great power in matters of
international security, is an important element all by itself in making it
lawful, or at least not unlawful. But in vast areas of security, self-defense, and the use of force, the U.S. government has in recent years left a huge
States does it, it means the United States must intend it as law. Traditional international law requires more than that, for good reason.
to get out in front on a practice that it has ramped up on grounds of both necessity and humanitarian minimization of force? The CIA has taken a few baby
Voting issue for fairness and ground, we cant get links if they
shift their agent because the agent is a critical locus for clash
in the debate
And, interpretation, Curtail means to create laws to lessen
power
Websters dictionary, no date, curtail, http://www.merriamwebster.com/dictionary/curtail, Accessed: 5-28-2015, /Bingham-MB
Full Definition of CURTAIL transitive verb : to make less by or as if by cutting off or
away some part <curtail the power of the executive branch> <curtail inflation>
curtailer \-t-lr\ noun See curtail defined for English-language learners See curtail
defined for kids Examples of CURTAIL The new laws are an effort to curtail illegal
drug use. School activities are being curtailed due to a lack of funds.
that would curtail this scheme, but the draft has not moved far in the rulemaking
process. We urge the Administration to finalize this regulation and reiterate a
recommendation to the Congress, first made in 1994, that would close the door on
financing practices that inflate the federal share by making excessive payments to
government owned facilities.
Congress has lost its one key advantage as a legislative bodythe decay
of the deliberative process. Thus, they do recognize that party politics has played an important role
in the degrading of congressional power, but they see a larger dynamic at work, one that reaches beyond
partisanship. While we agree with Howell and Pevehouse that Congress retains important mechanisms for
constraining the president, we tend to agree with the Mann and Ornstein view that there has been a significant and
sustained decline in Congress's willingness to use these mechanisms to challenge presidential power. This tendency
has been more prevalent in foreign affairs but has occurred noticeably across the spectrum of public policy issues.
Building from both of those perspectives, and others, we argue that it is helpful to understand the pattern of
congressional complicity in the rise of presidential power by viewing Congress's aiding and abetting as the logical outcomes of a
collective action problem.31 By constitutional design, the
can
conceptualize the strategic situation of members of Congress in terms of a prisoner's dilemma.33 If
members cooperate (that is, in Mann and Ornstein's parlance, if members identify with the institution), they could
maintain and advance Congress's institutional power. But they would have to bypass some
potential individual payoffs that could come from defection , such as "running
against Congress" as an electoral strategy. A stronger institution should
make all members of Congress better off, but it also makes them responsible for
policymaking. If members defect from the institution, they thus seek to maximize
constituency interests either by simply allowing power to fall by the wayside or by simply delegating it to
the president. As more and more members choose to defect over time, the "public
good" of a strong Congress is not provided for or maintainedand Congress's institutional
authority erodes and presidential power fills in the gap. Why, in other words, is congressional
activism so often "less than meets the eye," as Barbara Hinckley maintained in her book by that title? Or why has the ''culture of deference" that
Stephen Weissman identified developed as it has?34 We argue that the collective action problem that exists in Congress leads to
the development of these trends away from meaningful congressional stewardship of foreign policy and spending.
presidents have increasingly relied upon unilateral tools not penned in the
Constitution, especially when the president's ability to persuade or cajole
Congress has been diminished.14 Presidents can use such tools to "go it alone" in order to
change the policy status quo in the face of congressional gridlock. For example, this new
literature has shown that presidents increasingly use unilateral actions like executive orders,
proclamations, national security directives, executive agreements, and signing
statements to achieve their policy objectives.15 The tools of unilateral action
offer presidents advantages in power that are quite different from the powers derived from Neustadt's
framework. For one, unilateral action allows the president to act alone by initiating new
policy commitments without congressional cooperation.16 By doing so, the
president is able not only to establish a new policy status quo but also to frame the debate
surrounding such policy moves. Once a new policy commitment is made