FISA Non Sequiturs

Julian Sanchez notes this absurd post at The Corner about the Supreme Court's refusal to review a decision of the Sixth Circuit ruling that the ACLU lacked standing to sue the NSA over the president's warrantless wiretapping program. Andy McCarthy thinks that...

This underscores that the President had constitutional authority to order warrantless surveillance; that the cooperating telecoms were not only being patriotic but exercising sound judgment when they complied with requests for assistance; and that the House Democrats are acting reprehensibly by refusing to consider the intelligence reform bill passed overwhelmingly in the Senate.

Julian is right to call this an insane non sequitur. The amazing thing is the number of levels on which it's nonsensical. Let me see if I can count them.

In the first place, the Supreme Court gets thousands of appeals every year, and only accepts a few dozen of them. So the Supreme Court declining to hear a case, in and of itself, tells us absolutely nothing about the merits of the case. It simply suggests that the justices had other cases they were more interested in hearing.

Second, the Sixth Circuit decision the Supreme Court allowed to stand didn't address the merits of the ACLU's lawsuit—i.e. the legality of the so-called Terrorist Surveillance Program—either. Rather, the Sixth Circuit held that because the plaintiffs couldn't prove that they personally had been spied upon, they lacked standing to bring the lawsuit. This has absolutely nothing to do with whether the program is legal or constitutional.

Third, the telecoms were not a party to this lawsuit at all, so I'm baffled as to how it could have any implications for whether what they did was legal. The legality of the program and the legality of the telecoms' participation in it are distinct questions. One could perfectly well argue that the program was legal but the telecoms' participation in it was not, or vice versa. So the fact that a lawsuit against the government failed tells us nothing about whether the lawsuits against the telecoms will succeed.

Fourth, the lawsuits that have been filed against the telecoms are different in important respects from this decision. The EFF suit against AT&T, for example, is based on specific evidence that AT&T is diverting traffic from its fiber-optic network into a secret room controlled by the NSA. This is the kind of concrete evidence that was missing from the ACLU v. NSA case.

Finally, and most obviously, none of this has anything to do with the merits of the competing House and Senate FISA reform bills, or with any ulterior motives Democrats might have. And indeed, if McCarthy is right that all of the lawsuits are groundless, then it's a little bit of a mystery why he's so anxious for telecom immunity. If the telecoms didn't break the law, or if the law they broke was unconstitutional, then they should be able to make that argument in court. It's only if their arguments aren't likely to stand up in court that immunity becomes important.