The Washington Post this morning reports that a FISA court judge, appointed to the court by Rehnquist, has resigned in protest of Bush’s domestic spying program. While the New York Times is reporting that purely domestic communications have been swept up in the program.

Meanwhile, Larry Johnson at TPMCafe shatters the administration spin about the necessity of this program to deal with new technologies, etc.

“Having watched former Deputy CIA Director John Mclaughlin spend the day trying to back and fill for President Bush’s decision to circumvent the FISA Court procedure (which occurred during Mclaughlin’s tenure), we begin to understand why the CIA declined so badly under his watch. Mclaughlin argues, as always, in a calm, polite voice–the quintessential bureaucrat–that the threat is new and terrorists move too quick. Now, either he’s lying, which I don’t think, or he spent too much time cloistered at the Headquarters in McLean and is sadly misinformed. The so-called “new practice,” where terrorists call on one phone, dump it, pick up a new phone, dump it, and so on, was pioneered by the Colombian drug cartels, among others, more than ten years ago. DEA, while facing some challenges, has actually become quite adept at chasing these guys while working within the constraints of FISA. Surely Mclaughlin is not asking us to believe that the intelligence community is too stupid to learn lessons from DEA?”

Meanwhile, five senators, including two republicans, have called for hearings into the program. And I think Kevin Drum is exactly right about this:

Of course, their argument is not that the president has the inherent power to authorize domestic surveillance anytime he wants, only that he has that power during wartime. And as near as I can tell, that’s the elephant in the room that no one is really very anxious to discuss: What is “wartime”? Is George Bush really a “wartime president,” as he’s so fond of calling himself? Conservatives take it for granted that he is, while liberals tend to avoid the subject entirely for fear of being thought unserious about the War on Terror. But it’s something that ought be brought up and discussed openly.

(…)

If this is how we define “wartime,” it means that in the century from 1940 to 2040 the president will have had emergency wartime powers for virtually the entire time. But does that make sense? Is anyone really comfortable with the idea that three decades from now the president of the United States will have had wartime executive powers for nearly a continuous century?

Somehow we need to come to grips with this. There’s “wartime” and then there’s “wartime,” and not all armed conflicts vest the president with emergency powers. George Bush may have the best intentions in the world â€â€? and in this case he probably did have the best intentions in the world â€â€? but that still doesn’t mean he has the kind of plenary power Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt exercised during their wars.

And when he says “this program was the result of a panicky decision by a panicky president.”

[UPDATE] Right-wing spin on the equivalency of Clinton/Carter equivalents is not only irrelevant, it’s bullshit.

Also read Peter Daou.