Greenwald's very first Salon blog posting in 2006 trashed Specter's FISA bill
Echoes of the Nixon era
Arlen Specter's FISA bill would put President Bush above the rule of law, just as an earlier president would've wanted.
With one piece of legislation, Sen. Arlen Specter seeks to expand the Bush administrations radical theory of executive power beyond the wildest dreams of Dick Cheney or even John Yoo. Just when it looked as though some semblance of checks and balances was being restored, Specter the Pennsylvania Republican who masqueraded for months as a tenacious opponent of the White House offers a bill that would strike an immeasurable blow for the Bush vision of an imperial presidency.
Specters bill (S. 2543) is titled the National Security Surveillance Act, and it is framed as a series of amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA. The Senate approved FISA in 1978 in the wake of decades of eavesdropping abuses by the executive branch under both parties. FISA allowed aggressive eavesdropping by the president against terrorists and other enemies of the United States, but required that it be conducted with judicial oversight to ensure this awesome power would no longer be abused.
In reality, Specter does not want to amend the mandates of FISA so much as abolish them. His bill makes it optional, rather than mandatory, for the president to subject himself to judicial oversight when eavesdropping on Americans, in effect returning the nation to the pre-FISA era. Essentially, the president would be allowed to eavesdrop at will, precisely the situation that led to the surveillance abuses of the Nixon White House and J. Edgar Hoovers FBI.
Specters bill will have three troubling consequences if it becomes law. First, it makes lawbreaking legal. When the New York Times revealed last December that the Bush administration has been eavesdropping without judicial approval for the past four years, it meant that the president has been systematically violating a law that makes such eavesdropping a crime punishable by up to five years in prison. If laws are to have any meaning, then elected officials cannot simply violate them with impunity. Specters bill not only virtually guarantees there would be no consequences for this deliberate, ongoing criminality, but rewards and endorses the presidents lawbreaking by changing the law to conform to the presidents conduct.
much more ...
So who is being cynically partisan and who is being intellectually consistent?