I hate bad logic — especially when it appears in otherwise reputable sources. It hurts my brain to read it. So when I came across a new article in the Wall Street Journal that made that claim that Bush’s illegal wiretapping activities were somehow vindicated by the recently published decision from the FISA court, I got a huge headache.

I wanted to write a point-by-point explanation of why the article was so incorrect but I don’t have much time and Anonymous Liberal already did it for me:

1) From 1978-2006, there was a law in place that said “don’t do X; if you do X, it’s a felony.”

2) The Bush administration secretly did X.

3) When it was caught doing X (a felony under existing law), it argued that it had the “inherent authority” to do X regardless of what the law says, a claim that has no support in constitutional case law.

4) This “inherent authority” argument was emphatically rejected by the Supreme Court in the Hamdan case in 2006 in a virtually identical context, causing widespread wailing and gnashing of teeth among right wing true believers (see McCarthy, Andrew).

5) The Bush administration, after a series of adverse court rulings, was finally forced to go to Congress in 2006, and Congress amended the law to expressly allow the Bush administration to do X.

6) Now the FISA Court of Review has ruled that Congress was within its authority to pass that law and so the Bush administration is free to do X.