More FISA Debate

Armando of Daily Kos believes Bush's position borders on "A Little Bit of Monarchy," but feels Orin Kerr of the Volokh Conspiracy is condoning the position:

Some conservatives, it appears, favor a little bit of monarchical powers for the President. Orin Kerr, a respected conservative lawyer who blogs at Volokh Conspiracy, appears to be one of those:

Was the secret NSA surveillance program legal? Was it constitutional? Did it violate federal statutory law? It turns out these are hard questions, but I wanted to try my best to answer them. My answer is pretty tentative, but here it goes: Although it hinges somewhat on technical details we don't know, it seems that the program was probably constitutional but probably violated the federal law known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Say what? It is Constitutional for the President of the United States to violate a duly enacted federal law? How does that work exactly? Is FISA unconstitutional? Does the President have plenary powers when acting as Commander in Chief?

Orin Kerr of the Volokh Conspiracy refutes this misunderstanding:

The legality of the NSA surveillance program raises two different questions: 1) Does the NSA's surveillance program violate a provision of the Constitution?, and 2) Does the NSA's surveillance program violate any constitutionalily valid statutes? The two are quite separate issues: Whether executive branch action violates a statute is different from whether it violates the Constitution. See Dalton v. Specter. (Hat tip: Madisonian)

In my post, I argued that the monitoring probably didn't violate the Constitution (and in particular, the Fourth Amendment), but that it probably did violate FISA. This doesn't mean that the monitoring was legal; it only means that of the two possible grounds that it could be illegal, I think it was probably illegal on one ground but not the other ground.

The distinction is a little tricky in this context because some are arguing that Article II renders FISA unconstitutional in some ways. But when I said that the monitoring was probably constitutional, I only meant that the monitoring probably didn't violate the Fourth Amendment; I didn't mean that the Constitution invalidates a statute that makes the monitoring illegal. As Armando notes, I rejected that argument. (And I'm glad to see that the Administration isn't relying on the Article II argument any more, at least if its letter to the Hill last week is an indication.

I wondered if they wouldn't ditch the Article II position as way too extreme. I guess they're going with the AUF as implicit in the FISA. It should be interesting to watch.