Alberto Gonzales says that the president’s warrantless wiretapping program is constitutional, necessary and legal.
I can see where it may be constitutional, though that seems debateable. It might conceiveably also be ‘necessary’, though that’s a malleable term and it’s a difficult one to judge as long as the president won’t allow any oversight of what he’s doing. But it does seem to be clearly illegal. There simply does not appear to be any real question about that. The FISA law appears to speak directly to the facts at hand.
The law might be a bad one. Perhaps it should be revised or repealed. But it’s not voluntary.
And in this post Kevin Drum hits on a key point …
I’m also more tired than you can imagine of his constant invocation of presidents from Washington to Roosevelt who authorized warrantless surveillance in wartime. All of that happened before FISA was passed in 1978 and is completely meaningless. And he knows it.
Kevin doesn’t fully unpack what I suspect he’s getting at here. The argument to history that Gonzales is attempting isn’t just off point. It’s typical of the administration’s basic way of operating with the public — conscious misdirection and flimflam. You can’t make this argument unless your intent is to confuse the issue and avoid the issue of whether the president has to follow the law.
