A Stitch in Haste

The Vice President on the warrantless wiretapping scandal:

Vice President Dick Cheney on Tuesday vigorously defended the Bush administration's use of secret domestic spying and efforts to expand presidential powers, saying "it's not an accident that we haven't been hit in four years."

Perhaps, but it's also not an accident that the American people are, overall, somewhere between "upset" and "furious" over the revelation.

Yes, there are very arcane legal issues swirling around the triumvirate of the Fourth Amendment, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the Authorization for Use of Military Force Act. And perhaps reasonable minds can disagree as to whether these provisions allow or proscribe what the National Security Agency did.

But that's the whole point. These issues are complex, not "clear" as senior White House officials initially and arrogantly declared. These are difficult questions, and they should have been treated as such. This the White House did not do.

Detailed expert analyses of the legal and constitutional issues are appearing elsewhere. But here are the not-so-complicated legal principles that the American people are going to focus on:

--"You need a warrant or a writ or something..."

--You could have gotten a warrant from the secret court created expressly for this sort of thing.

--A declaration of war does not turn the President into a dictator.

--"Commander-in-chief" refers to the military, not spying on American citizens.

--The War on Terror is not a "traditional" war, and the traditional expansive view of presidential powers in time of war is therefore not entirely applicable to the War on Terror, any more than it would be to the "War on Drugs."

--Notifying a handful of senators (and then swearing them to secrecy) is not "proceeding with the approval of Congress."

These may be simplistic or even incomplete legal concepts. But that does not mean they are fundamentally wrong. The Administration is going to be hard-pressed to fall back, as has been its approach thus far, on the twin prongs of "just trust us" and "it's technical." This is too important to be technical.

The War on Terror notwithstanding, Americans do not want to have to trust our elected leaders, and they do not want the Constitution to be "technical."