VirusHead

Tempest in a Teapot? Bunch of Nonsense?

No way.
As I said, it’s illegal surveillance.
Illegal. Illegal. Illegal. (stamp, stamp, and…wait for it…. … … … Stamp!)

The research arm of Congress (The Congressional Research Service) has issued a report concluding that that the administration’s justification for the warrantless eavesdropping authorized by President Bush conflicts with existing law and hinges on weak legal arguments.

This from the Washington Post

The Congressional Research Service’s report rebuts the central assertions made recently by Bush and Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales about the president’s authority to order secret intercepts of telephone and e-mail exchanges between people inside the United States and their contacts abroad.

The 44-page report said that Bush probably cannot claim the broad presidential powers he has relied upon as authority to order the secret monitoring of calls made by U.S. citizens since the fall of 2001. Congress expressly intended for the government to seek warrants from a special Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court before engaging in such surveillance when it passed legislation creating the court in 1978, the CRS report said.

The report also concluded that Bush’s assertion that Congress authorized such eavesdropping to detect and fight terrorists does not appear to be supported by the special resolution that Congress approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, which focused on authorizing the president to use military force.

“It appears unlikely that a court would hold that Congress has expressly or impliedly authorized the NSA electronic surveillance operations here,” the authors of the CRS report wrote.

Unless of course it’s a Supreme Court that put him in office (with judicial activism never before seen). Now that Roberts has been added, we will see a real fight over Alito.

Another juicy snippet:

Some law professors have been skeptical of the president’s assertions, and several said yesterday that the report’s conclusions were expected. “Ultimately, the administration’s position is not persuasive,” said Carl W. Tobias, a University of Richmond law professor and an expert on constitutional law.

“Congress has made it pretty clear it has legislated pretty comprehensively on this issue with FISA,” he said, referring to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. “And there begins to be a pattern of unilateral executive decision making. Time and again, there’s the executive acting alone without consulting the courts or Congress.”