Power Line and today's GOP: What happened to the old Republican Party?

The following article and the recent federal court decision in American Civil Liberties Union vs. National Security Agency was derided on Power Line — no surprise. The question many of us have who have been around for a while and remember the old Republican Party, the one that advocated a smaller, less intrusive government and one that respected civil liberties — well, what happened to it?

An independent and fearless judiciary

By Geoffrey R. Stone
Published August 24, 2006

On Aug. 17, federal Judge Anna Diggs Taylor held that the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance program violates the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 and the Constitution.

Although I agree wholeheartedly with Taylor's conclusion, I was surprised by the decision. It takes a good deal of courage for a judge to hold unlawful a program that the president of the United States asserts is essential to national security. Too often, judges in wartime have failed to uphold the rule of law. Too often, they have sustained programs they should have held unlawful, ranging from the widespread suppression of dissent in World War I, to the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II, to the persecution of "Communists" during the Cold War.

The rest is here.