News Federal Judge Rules NSA Wiretapping Illegal
A federal court in Michigan ruled today that the Bush administration’s NSA wiretapping program is unconstitutional, and ordered that it be halted immediately.
District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor found that President Bush exceeded his proper authority and that the eavesdropping without warrants violated the First and Fourth Amendment protections of free speech and privacy.“It was never the intent of the Framers to give the president such unfettered control, particularly where his actions blatantly disregard the parameters clearly enumerated in the Bill of Rights,” she wrote, in a decision that the White House and Justice Department said they would fight to overturn.
But the best paragraph in the decision isn’t in the Times piece:
We must note that the Office of the Chief Executive has itself been created, with its powers, by the Constitution. There are no hereditary Kings in America and no powers not created by the Constitution. So all “inherent powers” must derive from that Constitution.
Burn.
Full Opinion (pdf)
Which is worse: That a federal court ruled that the President of the United States has repeatedly violated the U.S. Constitution, or that the biggest news of the day for most of the American news media is a new development in the JonBenet Ramsey case?