The program does not appear to be illegal in the slightest degree. Would I have liked the administration to codify the program? Absolutely. I'd always like to have the Congress and executive branch on the same page. Sadly, as I understand it, when approached at the time Congressional leaders said that such a law would not pass. This is unfortunate not because it means that the President could not do what he has done absent Congressional action but because it is always better to have Congress clearly involved in providing oversight.
It should not be too late to codify this program to reassure our people that the program is under some formal oversight. There are a number of reasons such a program is needed to protect us:
Given these statements of the obvious, the president ought to open his State of the Union Address by asking Congress to give him official authority to approve warrantless searches of known and identified terrorists, or of people in regular contact with those terrorists whom authorities reasonably suspect of plotting to commit acts of murder, terror or sabotage. These activities ought to be subject to monthly review by the attorney general. The administration also ought to be required each month to brief the top four congressional leaders, both intelligence committees and the head of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
The proposal would codify the status quo -- but shorten the reporting periods to 30 days from 45 -- and place the impeachment crowd in a sticky situation. The public would support both proposals overwhelmingly, leaving the president's most hysterical critics isolated utterly.
And codifying the program will be a protection that a needed program will not evolve into a domestic spying program that critics of today's program wrongly assert it to be.
