A previous Republican president (Nixon) conducted illegal domestic spying—in addition to several other criminal endeavors—and as a result, the Congress passed a law, the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, that set out specific procedures for the government to bypass the illegal search and seizure protections afforded American citizens by the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America. You would think a law circumventing something as sacrosanct as the Bill of Rights was bad enough.

But now we discover that using that secret court to secretly spy on American citizens was not enough for the Bush administration, which believes that the president has the authority to ignore both that law and the Fourth Amendment and allow his intelligence agents to spy on Americans with absolutely no third-party oversight at all.

A responsible Congress would question a president who blatantly violated both the law and the Constitution. Heck, a REPUBLICAN Congress would probably IMPEACH a DEMOCRATIC president who violated the law and the Constitution. But it seems that a Republican Congress reacts differently when it is dealing with a Republican president. The Republican Congress is seeking a way to make it perfectly legal for the president to do whatever he wants. That way, you see, it isn't a case of breaking the law. Because if there's a provision saying the law doesn't apply to the president, then that makes everything okay.

The American people need to be very worried about this. Our government is built upon a system of checks and balances that prevent any single branch of the government—or any single individual, in this case—from acting without oversight. That's the difference between a government of elected representatives and a dictatorship.

Since the administration covers its tracks by classifying everything, details of any illegal activities are kept from public view. In many cases, it seems, the details are also kept from bipartisan Congressional view. Details are only made available to those who will not question the activities. It is hard to believe that the National Security Agency cannot submit requests to the secret FISA court to obtain secret wiretaps in a timely manner. We are not dealing with an episode of 24 here.

It is far more likely that the wiretaps are being used for other, political purposes, and that documentation in the FISA system would eventually come back to haunt the perpetrators. Just something for you to think about. Spying on American citizens for political reasons is not new. Richard Nixon did it. J Edgat Hoover did it. It was an abuse of power then and it is an abuse of power now. No one is above the law.