I’ll say it again….it is a matter of great convenience to be able to file a lawsuit in a court you know to be friendly to your cause. It was no accident that this was filed in her court. It was judge shopping, and the knowledge that this court would be friendly. She was, after all, appointed by Jimmy “I’ve Lusted In My Heart” Carter. He was a disaster as a president and the ripple effect of that huge error in judgement on the part of the American people is being felt to this day.

He would look at you like you had three heads, that’s what he would do…

just before he had you arrested for subversion.

It seems obvious that this decision, like KELO, is politically motivated, by the faction in this country who favors minority rule by the judiciary. IMO, this situation is almost as important as the war on terrorists and the illegal immigration problem in preserving our way of life in the US. It would be a huge step forward for freedom if we overturned this one, Roe and KELO, in the next two years.

Ken,

Thank you, but no. There should be a period after the word neophyte, then a carriage return/paragraph and a blockquote starting with the words “Regarding the Fourth Amendment…” through the end of the comment. Again thanks.

Ken and Pilgrim,

A very interesting point about judge shopping since Taylor was the judge who treid to hijack the UM Law School affirmative action case from another, less enlightened, judge on the 6th.

Speaking of the 6th, how odd that this is the circuit in which Harry Reid killed the nomination of Judge Henry Saad to the Court of Appeals, announcing that there was “a problem” with “the nominee’s FBI file.”

Henry Saad would have been filibustered anyway,

Reid said on the floor of the Senate.

All you need to do is have a member go upstairs and look at his confidential report from the FBI, and I think we would all agree that there is a problem there.

What an odd coincidence.

Just because the President says so doesn’t make what ever he said the supreme rule.

Dave Miller,

The same could well be said about Judge Taylor. In fact it is being said by any number of learned, reasonable persons, both those who support the NSA program and those who do not.

Ultimately, as you should know, the supreme law oof the land is what the Supreme Court says it is. I have yet to read one knowledgeable and authoritative opinion, from either side of the aisle, that thinks Taylors ruling will stand appellate scrutiny, either at the 6th Circuit level or SCOTUS.

It is curious, however, that there has been nary a peep of reasoned protest about the immediate stay of the Taylor injuction. Or had you even noticed that distinctive bit of silence?

No problem, glad to help out.

If anyone else needs their comments fixed or edited, just ask.

First, Mr. Bryan Cunningham, former Clinton-era federal prosecutor

(W)e cannot accept the stunningly amateurish piece of, I hesitate even to call it legal work, by which she purports to make our government go deaf and dumb to those would murder us en masse.

I wouldn’t accept this utterly unsupported, constitutionally and logically bankrupt collection of musings from a first-year law student, much less a new lawyer at my firm. …the judge clearly failed to do enough homework to understand the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act itself, much less the Fourth Amendment…

Utterly ignoring this 2002 FISA Court of Review opinion, as well as the numerous 1970s-’80s federal appeals and district court decisions directly opposed to her position, Judge Taylor offers instead an extended discussion of a 1765 case from England.

Whatever Judge Taylor’s motives, it is critical to understand the impact of her decision, were it allowed to stand… there would be no lawful way, short of amending the Constitution, to ever collect catastrophic-terrorist-attack warning information unless we knew in advance it was coming, and the identities of the precise individuals who were going to communicate it.

And from the editors of the Wall Street Journal, hardly legal neophytes.

Regarding the Fourth Amendment: (Judge Taylor) manages to forget or overlook that no one is being denied his liberty and no evidence is being brought in criminal proceedings based on what the NSA might learn through listening to al Qaeda communications. The wiretapping program is an intelligence operation, not a law-enforcement proceeding. Congress was duly informed, and not a single specific domestic abuse of such a wiretap has yet been even alleged, much less found.”

As for the First Amendment, Judge Taylor asserts that the plaintiffs–a group that includes the ACLU and assorted academics, lawyers and journalists who believe their conversations may have been tapped but almost surely weren’t–had their free-speech rights violated because al Qaeda types are now afraid to speak to them on the phone.

But the wiretapping program is not preventing anyone from speaking on the phone. Quite the opposite–if the terrorists stopped talking on the phone, there would be nothing to wiretap. Perhaps the plaintiffs should have sued the New York Times, as it was that paper’s disclosure of the program that created the “chill” on “free speech” that Judge Taylor laments.

Before yesterday, no American court had ever ruled that the President lacked the Constitutional right to conduct such wiretaps. President Carter signed the 1978 FISA statute that established the special court to approve domestic wiretaps even as his Administration declared it was not ceding any Constitutional power. And in the 2002 decision In Re: Sealed Case, the very panel of appellate judges that hears FISA appeals noted that in a previous FISA case (U.S. v. Truong), a federal “court, as did all the other courts to have decided the issue, held that the President did have inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches to obtain foreign intelligence information.” We couldn’t find Judge Taylor’s attempt to grapple with those precedents, perhaps because they’d have interfered with the lilt of her purple prose.

Yes, the proper venue for this case would have been the DC Circuit, where most such cases are filed.