In at least one area, President Bush is on the run.
Congress should run him to ground.
The issue, which should be of concern to Democrats, Republicans and independents alike, is illegal spying on Americans by the National Security Agency.
Back in 2005, the New York Times (after unconscionably holding the story for a full year) exposed the fact that Bush, in late 2001, had authorized the NSA to illegally begin a wide-ranging program of monitoring the phone calls and internet communications of Americans in direct and blatant violation of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). That act had been passed by Congress in 1978 precisely because of a similar spying program authorized by President Richard Nixon. It had turned out Nixon was using the NSA illegally to spy on political opponents both outside and inside his own administration.
Last year, a federal judge determined, in a case brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, that Bush's actions had been illegal, violating both FISA (a felony), and the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
Civil Libertarians both among the public at large and in
Congress, have been up in arms ever since disclosure of the Bush
spying, both because of its clear affront to the rule of law, and
because no explanations for it put forward by the administration made
any sense. Bush and his legal advisers at the White House and in the
Justice Department have been claiming for nearly two years that they
"had to" violate FISA because of a supposed need to monitor suspected
terrorists, but critics rightly point out that the FISA law was
designed to make such monitoring easy. Under FISA, there is a special
secret court of 12 senior federal judges whose only responsibility is
to hear government requests for secret wiretaps. Its
top-security-clearance rated members stand ready to act even in the
middle of the night, and in fact have only rejected such requests for
warrants four times since 1978.
Furthermore, critics note, the FISA law gives law enforcement and NSA wiretappers three days to seek a warrant after they start
wiretapping! In other words, there is no issue of timeliness. Under
FISA, the administration can start spying, and seek permission retroactively.
This has many people suspecting that what the administration has been
doing was not spying on terrorists at all--but rather spying on people
it should not have been spying on--people that even the most
accommodating FISA judges would not have granted warrants for. Who
might these people be? Well, given the administration's many comments
about how critics of the president are "aiding the terrorists," they
could well be legitimate critics of administration policies like
torture or the Iraq War. Given the administration's paranoid obsession
about leaks, they could also be people within the Bush administration.
Both such groups were targets of Nixon's illegal NSA spying, and it
seems likely they have also been targets of Bush's mysterious spying
campaign.
In any case, while past efforts to get answers from the administration
foundered in a Republican Congress, with the Democrats in control of
both houses, it was becoming clear that Bush would be facing hard
questioning, possibly including subpoenas of documents and people, by
the new Congress.
That prospect has led the administration to chaznge course and announce
that it is ceasing the warrantless spying, and will now be adhering to
FISA and seeking warrants when it wants to monitor someone’s
communications.
Clearly Bush is hoping that the problem will now go away; that the
Congress will drop plans to seriously investigate the five-year illegal
NSA spying campaign he illegally ordered up. Indeed, the Justice
Department has reportedly already gone to the Court of Appeals to
request that the federal case finding the spying to be illegal,
currently on appeal by the government, be "mooted," or ruled no longer
at issue because of their new decision to operate within the law. No
doubt similar arguments will be made to the House and Senate
intelligence and justice committees.
Such efforts should be slapped down.
The fact remains that for more than five years, this president
willfully violated a federal law. Both the courts and the Congress, as
well as the American people, have a right and a duty to know, in clear
detail, both what he did and why he did it.
Only a few months ago, the president and his attorney general were
insisting that Bush's illegal spying campaign was absolutely essential
in the so-called "War on Terror," and that the procedures of the FISA
law were "too slow and too cumbersome" to do the job. Now, faced with
the likelihood of real congressional inquiry, the president and his
attorney general are claiming that they can do just fine staying within
the law, and getting warrants from the FISA judges.
What do they take us for, idiots?
If, as seems almost certain, the president abused his power and sicced
the NSA on American citizens who were not violating the law or involved
in terrorism, he should be impeached for the most grave of
Constitutional violations.
Writings 
In at least one area, President Bush is on the run. 
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