It’s a shame that Republicans in Congress are already brokering a deal with the White House to shield the administration’s warrantless eavesdropping on American citizens before the program has been fully examined.
The deal involving weak-kneed Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee and Vice President Dick Cheney would forestall a serious investigation while permitting the National Security Agency to continue domestic eavesdropping without court warrants.
The lawmakers instead are proposing troubling legislation that would allow the NSA to wiretap citizens for 45 days – or in some cases 90 days – without a warrant.
The legislation would also create subcommittees in both houses of Congress that would be “fully informed” (quotation marks signify skepticism, of course) about the surveillance activities.
However, limiting the scope of a program whose full extent is still largely unknown to Congress is premature.
Until recently, Republicans and Democrats in Congress had been demanding to know more about the NSA program before allowing it to continue.
Now is not the time to let up – or to merely let Democrats turn this into a partisan gambit. Congress needs to conduct a full-scale inquiry into a program that may well be illegal.
President Bush authorized the program in secret after the Sept. 11 terror attacks and claims to have inherent authority under the Constitution to do so.
The administration says the program is legal even though the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act requires a warrant from a secret court to conduct surveillance. A recent update to the law even allows a warrant to be obtained 72 hours after the eavesdropping has started, but the administration seems to view the warrant process as cumbersome, even when flexibility is built in.
Sen. Lindsey Graham R-S.C., a member of the intelligence committee, believes that by authorizing the program, Congress in essence rejects the administration’s legal argument that the president has inherent power to order the spying.
Republican senators who back the plan defended it as a hard-fought compromise with the White House, which has strongly resisted congressional efforts to interfere in the eavesdropping program.
A proposal by Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, makes more sense to us. Specter, whose committee is also examining the NSA program, wants to seek a ruling on the program’s constitutionality from the special intelligence court that was created under FISA, a ruling that would be made before the program could continue.
“I think there needs to be a determination as to what is going on constitutionally,” Specter said. “The [FISA] court is reliable. I think the court ought to pass on its constitutionality.”
So do we.
