Fool's gold.(POLITICS)(Russ Feingold)

RUSS FEINGOLD has thrown down the gauntlet, and Republicans should be eager to pick it up. The Wisconsin senator wants to censure President Bush for the National Security Agency surveillance program. This should be the occasion for a thoroughgoing debate on the program and its legal basis, one on which Republicans are on solid footing.

If Bush had been breaking the law, he wouldn't have briefed top members of Congress about the program. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which the administration is supposed to have violated, doesn't cover wiretapping overseas, and the bulk of the NSA program seems to have involved overseas targets who were calling persons in the U.S. The theory of the Feingolds of the world is that FISA is a global regime and a president can never institute any surveillance outside of its parameters. Not only is this a misreading of the statute, it is a trampling on executive power as it is supposed to exist under the Constitution. It is the very nature of the executive that it doesn't require legislative authorization for all of its actions, so long as those actions don't violate the law and are constitutional. That is the case here. Indeed, Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee seemed prepared to accept a deal to give congressional blessing to the NSA program in exchange for enhanced oversight--before Feingold launched his incendiary censure proposal.

Feingold is thinking of politics more than the law. The left-wing "netroots" (the grassroots of the Internet) are rallying to Feingold's proposal. These bloggers and their readers are a key part of Feingold's constituency for his prospective run for the 2008 presidential nomination. Anything ...