John McCain has changed his position on illegal warrantless wiretapping: he used to think that the President had to uphold the nation’s laws. Now he says that the Constitution is subordinate to the all-powerful executive order.
My favorite line on this comes from the chickenhawks who say that the Fourth Amendment was written before the All Powerful Threat of Terrorism. Sure thing. Ben Franklin and his pals couldn’t possibly have foreseen a world in which the very idea of America was under some kind of military threat. Those candyasses didn’t understand what war was about. They were armchair theorists, civilians who’d never anticipated foreign soldiers on American soil — surely if they’d known that America might some day face an actual existential risk, they would have put a little asterisk next to each clause of the Bill of Rights leading to a footnote that said, “Unless the king president really, really needs to do it.”
[N]either the Administration nor the telecoms need apologize for actions that most people, except for the ACLU and the trial lawyers, understand were Constitutional and appropriate in the wake of the attacks on September 11, 2001. […]
We do not know what lies ahead in our nation’s fight against radical Islamic extremists, but John McCain will do everything he can to protect Americans from such threats, including asking the telecoms for appropriate assistance to collect intelligence against foreign threats to the United States as authorized by Article II of the Constitution.