[andyfox]

Thanks for the link. It's going to take a lot to analyze the editorial. A whole shovelful.

"America's Founders gave the executive branch the largest measure of Constitutional authority on national security. They recognized that a committee of 535 talking heads couldn't be trusted with such grave responsibility."

Really? Where does the Journal see that in the Constitution? I can't imagine the framers didn't recognize that 535 "talking heads" couldn't have grave responsibilities because they clearly wanted a balanced government where congress made the laws and the executive executed them. And, of course, there were not 535 members of congress in 1789.

"FISA established a process by which certain wiretaps in the context of the Cold War could be approved, not a limit on what wiretaps could ever be allowed."

The president and the attorney-general are claiming that the Constitution grants them the right to wiretap whenever they feel like if they say national security is involved. One wonders where in the Constitution they see this. The vice president weighed in on this today. More on that below.

"the evidence is also abundant that the Administration was scrupulous in limiting the FISA exceptions. They applied only to calls involving al Qaeda suspects or those with terrorist ties"

Where is this evidence?

"Inside the executive branch, the process allowing the wiretaps was routinely reviewed by Justice Department lawyers, by the Attorney General personally, and with the President himself reauthorizing the process every 45 days. In short, the implication that this is some LBJ-J. Edgar Hoover operation designed to skirt the law to spy on domestic political enemies is nothing less than a political smear."

The fact that Mr. Gonzalez approved the wiretaps is no consolation to me. He believes in an apparently unlimited presidential prerogative to do whatever the president wants; if the president does it, it's legal. And there is no smear as the Journal insinuates. I heard President Bush's most prominent critic on this issue, Senator Feingold, on Jim Lehrer's show last night and he said nothing of the sort.

"All the more so because there are sound and essential security reasons for allowing such wiretaps. The FISA process was designed for wiretaps on suspected foreign agents operating in this country during the Cold War. In that context, we had the luxury of time to go to the FISA court for a warrant to spy on, say, the economic counselor at the Soviet embassy."

There is no time constaint whatesoever. The president can wiretap and then has 72 hours to get ex post facto approval from the FISA court. That approval has been granted in all but five of the thousands of times the government has gone to the court. In fact, critics of the court have called it the Rubber-Stamp Court. There is no time constraint and no problem in getting court approval.

"Too many in the media and on Capitol Hill have forgotten that terrorism in the age of WMD poses an existential threat to our free society. We're glad Mr. Bush and his team are forcefully defending their entirely legal and necessary authority to wiretap enemies seeking to kill innocent Americans."

In a word, [censored]. Too many in the administration have forgotten that the executive is only one branch of government and that we have a free society only so long as all three branches follow the laws.

That brings us to Vice President Cheney's comments today:

"I believe in a strong, robust executive authority and I think that the world we live in demands it. And to some extent, that we have an obligation as the administration to pass on the offices we hold to our successors in as good of shape as we found them."

What is he talking about? Does he really think the executive authority has been attenuated?

"If there's a backlash pending," because of reports of National Security Agency surveillance of calls originating within the United States, he said, "I think the backlash is going to be against those who are suggesting somehow that we shouldn't take these steps to defend the country."

Note that language. Those who disagree with the wiretaps or other things ("these steps") are saying that we shouldn't defend the country. This has been a consistent argument of the administration, questioning the patriotism of those who take issue with the administration's tactics.

"Either we're serious about fighting the war on terror or we're not," the vice president said. "The president and I believe very deeply that there is a hell of a threat."

Apparently then, by implication, those who disagree with the administration are not serious about the war on terror and don't believe there is a hell of a threat.

This is simply shameful. It's a throwback to the redbaiting of the McCarthy era when politicians at the same point in the political spectrum as Mr. Cheney constantly smeared those who disagreed with them with the accusation of being "soft" on Communism.

"Watergate and a lot of the things around Watergate and Vietnam both during the '70s served, I think, to erode the authority I think the president needs to be effective, especially in the national security area," Cheney said. But he also said the administration has been able to restore some of "the legitimate authority of the presidency."

Watergate and Vietnam showed us that we had an imperial presidency that was out of control. Pathological liars, most prominents, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon shamed America, one quitting before he could be chased out of town and the other resigning in the wake of illegal actions. It was Nixon who said, "If the president does it, it's legal." This is apparently the doctrine the administration believes in, since both the vice president and the attorney general have said as much this week.

Cheney said that "many people believe" the War Powers Act, enhancing the power of Congress to share in executive branch decision-making on war, is unconstitutional and said "it will be tested at some point. I am one of those who believe that was an infringement on the authority of the president."

I await further explication from the vice president. According to the constitution, the congress has the war-making power.

"But I do believe that especially in the day and age we live in, the nature of the threats of we face - and this is true during the Cold War as well as I think is true now - the president of the United States needs to have his constitutional powers unimpaired, if you will, in terms of the conduct of national security policy," the vice president said.

His constitution powers "unimpaired"? Mr. Cheney should read the constitution sometime.

"You know, it's not an accident that we haven't been hit in four years," Cheney said. "I think there's a temptation for people to sit around and say, 'Well, gee that was just a one-off affair, they didn't really mean it.'"

What people have been sitting around saying this? (According to the 9/11 commission, it's the Bush administration, who got a terrible report card from the commissioners recently.) Who has said, "they didn't really mean it?" Again, it's a smear on opponents insinutating that either "you're for us or you're against us."

"The bottom line is we've been very active and very aggressively defending the nation and using the tools at our disposal to do that," he said.

The criticism is not that the administration is not defending the nation but that it might have broken laws in doing so.

The administration has brought back a hubris and arrogance, and a disdain for respect for the law that we haven't seen since the worst days of Vietnam and Watergate. And, according to Mr. Cheney, he thinks it should, because the aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate was an unwarranted diminution of presidential power.

The comparison of Iraq with the disaster of Vietnam becomes more apt every day.