Why did President Bush circumvent the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act?

National Review columnist Byron York defended the president as keeping the nation's best interests in mind, describing the process of receiving a warrant from FISA court as arduous.

York writes:

In 2002, when the president made his decision, there was widespread, bipartisan frustration with the slowness and inefficiency of the bureaucracy involved in seeking warrants from the special intelligence court, known as the FISA court.

"It takes days, sometimes weeks, to get the application for FISA together," says one source. "It's not so much that the court doesn't grant them quickly, it's that it takes a long time to get to the court."

But York forgets something:

In the case of national emergencies, it's permitted to get a search warrant 72 hours after surveillance is conducted. (In the link, see Section F, Item 2.) The argument for speed doesn't make much sense when warrants can be issued after the surveillance operations have taken place.

David Sirota, writing yesterday on the Huffington Post Web site, wondered aloud about this spin: "There really is only one explanation that a sane, rational person could come up with: The surveillance operations Bush is ordering are so outrageous, so unrelated to the War on Terror and such an unconstitutional breach of authority that he knows that even a court that has rejected just four warrant requests in 25 years will reject what he's doing."

Merging Sirota comments with York's, one would have to assume that a Homeland Security team wouldn't be able to put together the paperwork quickly enough to gain a retroactive warrant from a lax court. It's a hard sell.

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If the "arduous paperwork" defense sounds familiar, it's because the Bush Administration used it just a few weeks ago.

According to an Oct. 30 Associated Press report, the administration often has failed to meet Homeland Security deadlines. Why? The official spin at the time was that there are too many deadlines.

Homeland Security spokesman Russ Knocke told the AP that the department goes to great lengths to work with Congress. But, he said, "there is an extraordinarily high number of reporting requirements." The department has to submit 256 reports to Congress every year, Knocke said.

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How do you get around arduous paperwork? Change the rules.

With control of the presidency and both houses of Congress, Bush could have changed the FISA rules in 2001, when Congress overwhelming supported the USA Patriot Act.

Similarly, rules regarding the number of reports Homeland Security has to file could have been dealt with when the department was created, again with overwhelming Congressional support, in 2002.

But neither of those things happened. Circumventing the rules now, after the fact, isn't the answer.

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This item first appeared at Journalists Against Bush's B.S.