WASHINGTON — Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., announced last week he will introduce legislation that would force the National Security Agency wiretapping program to be reviewed by the courts every 45 days.
As it currently stands, the program is re-authorized by President Bush every 45 days.
Dubbed the "Terrorist Surveillance Program" in an effort to focus on its role in thwarting future attacks, it allows the NSA to listen in without a warrant on conversations between Americans and suspected members of al-Qaida outside the country.
Lawmakers agree some level of terrorist surveillance is essential to national security, but some questioned the legality of warrantless spying during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing last Monday.
Specter, the Committee chairman, said during the hearing that he did not believe Congress' authorization to use "appropriate force" in the War on Terror included domestic surveillance.
His sentiments were also echoed by Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.
"I never envisioned that I was giving to this president or any other president the ability to go around FISA carte blanche," Graham said.
Democrats and Republicans grilled Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez during the hearing, specifically questioning whether the Senate's resolution to go to war in Iraq implicitly authorized surveillance normally approved in court under the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
Many have expressed reservations about the program, but Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., also a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has been the most vocal in accusing Bush of breaking the law.
While conceding the nation should be wiretapping terrorists in an effort to protect the country, Feingold said the country has yet to see any reason to "trample" the laws of the United States.
"The president's decision that he can break the law says far more about his attitude toward the rule of law than it does about the laws themselves," Feingold said during a Senate floor speech.
The Senate Judiciary Committee has scheduled two additional hearings to seek further testimony from Gonzalez and possibly former Attorney General John Ashcroft and the FISA court.
The White House later briefed the full House and Senate Intelligence Committees Thursday on some of the operational details of the program. These details were previously given only to party leaders in the House and Senate and ranking members of both Intelligence Committees.
In interviews following Thursday's briefing, Sen. Mike DeWine, R-Ohio, also a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said that making the program legal would be "easy," requiring only simple "legislative action."
Vice President Dick Cheney took an opportunity to make the wiretapping debate a political issue for the 2006 midterm elections in a speech to a partisan crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference Thursday evening in Washington.
"At the very least, this debate has clarified where all of us stand on the issue," Cheney said during the conference, "and with an important election coming up, people need to know just how we view the most critical questions of national security and how we propose to defend the nation that all of us, Republicans and Democrats, love and are privileged to serve."
