No Investigation Needed When You Have a Confession
Kagro X riffs on Glenn Greenwald to highlight a critical point in the censure/impeachment debate:
MYTH/EXCUSE NUMBER ONE: An investigation is needed before it can be known whether the President broke the law....
In defending itself, the Administration is offering only legal arguments -- not factual disputes -- as to why it had the right to eavesdrop without complying with the law (namely, that the President has inherent authority to eavesdrop even if the law prohibits it, and that Congress gave him implicit permission to eavesdropping outside of FISA when it enacted the AUMF). But the Administration is not denying -- and has never denied -- the fact that it engaged in the very warrantless eavesdropping covered by FISA.
Thus, no investigation could even conceivably shed further light on the question of whether the President broke the law. We know he did that. The sole question which Senators have to answer is what they think the consequences ought to be, if any, for a President to order eavesdropping on Americans citizens which Americans, through their Congress, prohibited by law.....
That's the Greenwald bit. Kagro X expounds and explains:
Anybody who tells you that sanctioning the president is inappropriate now, without an investigation, is full of it, and here's why: On the question of whether or not the president broke the law or had the "inherent authority" to break the law with his NSA surveillance program, a Congressional investigation is simply incapable of reaching a definitive conclusion.
As Glenn correctly points out, the "administration" does not dispute the facts here. They offer purely legal explanations: i.e., that the president's power in the arena of "national security" simply may not be constrained, neither by Congress nor the Constitution. No kind of Congressional investigation can possibly settle that dispute. A Constitutional amendment might do the trick. And an investigation might be a good place to decide whether or not that's necessary and/or desireable. But an investigation into the legality of the program cannot be other than fruitless. Such an investigation can (and most assuredly will) take testimony out the wazoo, and produce a 6,000 page report on its findings, but all it can possibly amount to is an overfluffed poll-taking of the Senators on the committee as to what their best guesses (or most fervent hopes) are.
In short, the law clearly prohibits warrantless wiretapping, and the President has admitted ordering warrantless wiretapping. No further evidence is needed.
