California Conservative

Sen. Pat Roberts, (R-KS), thinks that having judges oversee the President’s NSA intercept program, essentially eliminating Congress from the equasion. Here’s how the AP frames it:

Sen. Pat Roberts, (R-KS), said he is concerned that the secret court established by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act could not issue warrants as quickly as the monitoring program requires. But he is optimistic that the problem could be worked out. “You don’t want to have a situation where you have capability that doesn’t work well with the FISA court, in terms of speed and agility and hot pursuit,” Roberts was quoted as saying in Saturday’s New York Times.

This is subterfuge. He isn’t sure that FISA courts can respond with the requisite quickness but he’d still let FISA be part of the oversight equasion. That’s the epitome of foolishness. Here’s how Captain Ed responds to this proposal:

Congress wants to eat its cake and have it too. They want to take executive powers, and instead of making themselves politically responsible for the consequences, they want to pawn it off to a court. This is no different than their stated interpretation under FISA, except that Roberts is proposing an expediting process that clearly doesn’t exist now. In fact, Roberts wants to create another appointed court to supercede the FISA jurists, and who share with them the complete lack of accountability for their actions.

This is nothing more than a cowardly dodge, an attempt to keep this power dispute between Congress and the executive from reaching the Supreme Court — which will likely rule against Congress and strike down the wartime provisions of FISA. It also is another attempt to force a wartime role onto the judiciary, which has never before been propsosed and for which they are completely unsuited. Congress either needs to accept the oversight responsibility that the Administration has offered or drop the entire debate altogether.

As usual, Captain Ed’s analysis is right on the money. Since he said what I was thinking, and wording better than I probably would’ve, I’ll just leave it at that.

Cross-post at LetFreedomRing

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 18th, 2006 at 9:53 am and is filed under Author: Gary Gross, Homeland Security, Law, Terrorism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.