Politics & Power Quote by Pete du Pont

Franklin’s name here is less historical evidence than political solvent: invoke a founder, dissolve a constitutional dispute. Pete du Pont’s line is built to do two things at once. First, it reframes warrantless wiretapping from a question of statutory legality into a vibe check about American toughness. Second, it recruits Benjamin Franklin as a surrogate juror who conveniently cannot object.

The specific intent is to preempt the hardest part of the post-9/11 surveillance debate: the clash between Article II claims of inherent executive power and laws like FISA that were designed precisely to prevent secret, unilateral monitoring. By asking whether Bush “exceeded his constitutional authority” and then answering with Franklin, du Pont sidesteps courts, texts, and oversight in favor of patriotic intuition. Franklin becomes a rhetorical shield: if the man of kites and constitutions would approve, who are you to nitpick warrants?

The subtext is a familiar post-9/11 bargain: liberty is a luxury item in an emergency, and procedure is for peacetime. It also contains an implicit scolding of critics as naïve, precious, or insufficiently serious about national security. Notice the move from “illegal” (a concrete allegation) to “Franklin would not have thought so” (an untestable claim). That’s not argument; it’s permission.

Context matters. In the mid-2000s, revelations about NSA warrantless wiretapping forced Republicans and civil-liberties-minded Americans into an awkward split. Du Pont, a Republican elder statesman, offers a party-line reconciliation: exceptional threats justify exceptional executive action, and the founders are imagined as endorsing it. The wit, such as it is, lies in the audacity of outsourcing constitutional interpretation to a founding ghost.