The Specter surrender on wiretapping.

On July 13, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) announced a "compromise" agreement with the White House regarding the controversial NSA wiretapping program (which Specter had volubly criticized as unconstitutional).

The president would "voluntarily" agree to have the court established by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) assess the constitutionality of the wiretapping program. The FISA court, however, was established in 1978 to review specific warrant requests, rather than to hand down broad constitutional rulings. In exchange for the "concession" of al lowing FISA--the wrong court--to issue that ruling, Specter's proposed bill would strip all other federal courts of appellate jurisdiction on matters of electronic surveillance and wiretapping.

"This bill is not a compromise but a full-fledged capitulation on the part of the legislative branch to executive claims of power," correctly observed the Washington Post in a July 15 editorial.

Replying to criticism of his proposal, Specter explained: "The bill does not mandate the president to submit the program to the court [system] because the president did not want to institutionally bind presidents in the future."

Of course, presidents are "institutionally" bound by the chains of the Constitution, which established the judiciary and the legislature as co-equal branches of the federal government. Specter's supposed compromise destroys vital links in those necessary chains, further emancipating the dictatorial impulses President Bush has done little to disguise--and setting the stage for future presidents, both Republican and Democrat, to build on Mr. Bush's record.