Promoted from the diaries by Steven D, with some minor edits.

Bob Herbert’s editorial in the NYTs today points out what most of us in the progressive blogosphere already know, but that the country at large seems to be ignoring:  Our president is a confessed felon.

I’ll provide you some snips, since the Times has decided that their own sharing of this information on the Internet is not wise.

No one expects very much from Mr. Bush.  He’s currently breaking the law by spying on Americans in America without getting warrants, but for a lot of people that’s just George being George.  Forget the complexities of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or even the Fourth Amendment’s safeguards against unwarranted (pun intended) government intrusion into matters that we have a right to keep private.

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As the president put it, “If somebody from Al Qaeda is calling you, we’d like to know why.”

Well, that’s true Mr. President.  But Congress and the Constitution have spoken as clearly as a bright sun on a cloudless afternoon about these matters:  if you’re going to eavesdrop on Americans in the U.S., you’d better run out and get a warrant.

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It has become fashionable to say that this controversy is about the always difficult problem of balancing civil liberties and national security.  But I think the issue is starker than that.  The real issue is President Bush’s apparent belief — stoked at every opportunity by that zealot of zealots, Dick Cheney — that he can do just about anything he wants (mistreat prisoners, lock people up forever without charge), and justify it in the name of fighting terror.

“There’s an enemy out there,” said Mr. Bush.

That’s also true.  But this is not China or the old Soviet Union.  The United States should be the one place on the planet where even a devastating terror strike by Al Qaeda is unable to shake the foundations of the government, which is grounded in the rule of law, the separation of powers and a constitution that guarantees the fundamental rights of the citizenry.

A group of former government officials and law professors from some of the nation’s most distinguished universities sent a letter to Congressional leaders on Monday expressing their deep concern about the president’s domestic spying program.  They said:

“Although the program’s secrecy prevents us from being privy to all of its details, the Justice Department’s defense of what it concedes was secret and warrantless electronic surveillance of persons within the United States fails to identify any plausible legal authority for such surveillance.  Accordingly, the program appears on its face to violate existing law.”

Among those who signed the letter were William Sessions, the former F.B.I. director, and Phillip Heymann, a former deputy attorney general who is now a professor at Harvard Law School.

The Congressional Research Service, a nonpartisan arm of Congress, also took issue with the administration’s defense of the warrantless eavesdropping.  Its analysts searched diligently but apparently in vain for a legal justification of the spying authorized by the president.  Their detailed report on the constitutional and statutory issues raised by the program said, “It appears unlikely that a court would hold that Congress has expressly or impliedly authorized the N.S.A. electronic-surveillance operations here under discussion.

The administration’s attempt to justify the program, the analysts said, “does not seem to be as well grounded” as the administration seems to believe.”

I know that I am preaching to the choir by writing this.  The real question that needs to be put to the non-blogging citizenry of this country is simple:  Do you want to live under the claimed safety of a police state, or do you want the liberty and freedom guaranteed by our founders?

When editorialists in mainstream newspapers are calling the President a felon; when former F.B.I. directors, former Justice Department attorneys, and current law professors at the most respected colleges are writing to Congress to say that the President is acting outside the law;  when non-partisan arms of government are reporting that the President’s defense appears baseless under the law — these are calls to the citizenry as well as to Congress.  America must awake from its slumber.  We must reclaim the rule of law now.  Or we must fade from our two-hundred year dream of a government of laws free from tyranny.

Cross-posted at Daily Kos