The NY Times is reporting on a new Republican bill on domestic spying:

G.O.P. Reaches Tentative Deal on Domestic Spying Legislation

It’s nice to see the Times, which has a 12 year long history of fellating the GOP and the Bu$h maladministration, finally admitting that the domestic phone and computer eavesdropping Mr Bu$h ordered the NSA to engage in right after he took possession of our Oval Office was in fact spying. While the Times didn’t quite have the courage to admit all of the truth, a cynical man would say that the introduction of this program seven or eight months before the WTC attack on 9/11 shows Mr Bu$h either has incredible skills at forecasting the future or that he was bent on illegally and unconstitutionally spying on his domestic political opposition right from the start.

WASHINGTON, Sept. 25 — Republican leaders said Monday that they had reached a tentative agreement to garner political support for legislation on domestic surveillance, in part by sidestepping the question of whether the president has the constitutional authority to order wiretapping without a court order.

Senator Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican who leads the Judiciary Committee, said that in recent negotiations, the White House had agreed to delete language from his bill that critics said would have implicitly acknowledged the president’s constitutional authority to order wiretapping without a warrant.

Well, one expects Arlen Specter to sidestep any serious legal or constitutional issues; that’s his standard way of doing business. He likes his camera time, during which he portrays himself as a brave and diligent conservator of constitutional rights even as he crafts bills to give Mr Bu$h exactly what any tinpot dictator of a third-rate banana republic would love to have enshrined in law.

Three Republican senators — Larry E. Craig of Idaho, John E. Sununu of New Hampshire and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska — had raised concerns about this and other aspects of the Specter bill, which would submit the wiretapping program to a secret court to rule on its constitutionality. With the changes, they said they could support the legislation, and Mr. Specter predicted he would have enough Senate votes to gain passage.

The three said the new plan would protect “the rights afforded to citizens in the Constitution,” in part by requiring that the administration get a court order if it wanted to listen to conversations of an American citizen or others defined as “U.S. persons.” In a statement, they said the new plan would require that “in order to conduct electronic surveillance of a U.S. person, a court-ordered warrant is necessary.”

We don’t know whether to laugh, cry, scream, or defecate brown cubes. There already is a “secret court” which was established to rule on wiretap warrants. The FISA court, created in 1978, reportedly has denied four requests out of some 19,000 applications. Not even Barry Bonds has hit that many home runs.

So, what we’re allegedly seeing in this typically dishonest Republican kabuki is yet another law for Mr Bu$h to completely ignore in his ongoing assault against every principle of American democracy.

The administration declined to say when it would choose to seek warrants under the new plan.

See: Hell, ice cubes. Here’s the key sentence in the entire article:

The program approved by Mr. Bush “does allow for the interception without court order of international communications where one end is within the United States, and this agreement would provide this authority and would establish a process for moving to individualized court orders with respect to individuals within the United States,” said Brian Roehrkasse, a Justice Department spokesman. He declined to elaborate.

Heretofore all wiretapping required a court order. This new bill ”approved by Mr Bush” has killed the FISA court, because he can wiretap international communications. It also supposedly requires him to get warrants to listen in to his domestic opposition.

Helloooo, signing statement, or perhaps ignoring this provision outright, as he has in the past.