The American Thinker:
"Another Scandal that Wasn�t / January 9th, 2006
There is often much less than meets the eye in the news from our nation�s capital. Rarely, however, does anything as trivial as the NSA �domestic spying� story make the front pages and generate gales of heavy breathing from the media elite. Heavy breathing notwithstanding, that story is on a nonstop flight to nowhere. It will disappear without a trace despite the best efforts of the New York Times, the Washington Post and a cadre of demented members of Congress.
In the mean time it makes for entertaining theater of the absurd. The looniest congressional Democrats are muttering darkly about impeachment. Left-leaning lawyers are concocting closely reasoned arguments that the administration violated the terms of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) by gathering intelligence on our deadly enemies without consulting any judges. The New York Times and the Washington Post are working hard to keep the story going with new revelations, each more trivial than the last. The nutjobs at democraticunderground.com are quivering with anticipation. Could this, at last be their holy grail? Are we about to witness the second coming of Watergate
[...] If FISA tries to restrict the President’s power to spy on our enemies during a state of war that Congress itself proclaimed then FISA is blatantly unconstitutional. Only a fool or a traitor would suggest that Congress can constitutionally require that the President play “Mother-may- I” with a motley collection of judges before intercepting enemy communications in wartime.
Congress can no more empower judges to make decisions about how we gather intelligence than it could empower them to decide what targets our Air Force should bomb or what streets our troops should patrol.
There is nothing complicated about this. The President is Commander in Chief. He makes the military decisions. He decides, with the advice of his subordinate commanders, when and where the United States government should gather intelligence because that is a military decision.
If you find the scope of Presidential power in wartime frightening, you should. It is frightening. That is one reason wars are to be avoided whenever possible. It is also why elections matter. The President of the United States has awesome responsibilities and correspondingly awesome powers. The Constitution entrusts all executive power to him and executive power is unavoidably broader in wartime. [...]
