The NSA Ruling: Pure Leftist Twaddle

Molly's bage, quoting Bryan Cunningham:

Much will be said about this opinion in the coming days. I’ll start with this: 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.

Patterico's down on it too. Here he quotes Dan McLaughlin:

Judge Taylor’s opinion reads like a parody of bad judicial reasoning. The self-appointed legal solons of the Left will have to work long and hard to compose the straight face to dress up this opinion as anything but a travesty of the judicial process.

Lots of links at both places.

It's interesting how the "judge" contrived standing for the plaintiff's. Standing is a requirement in any case, to keep the court ruling on live disputes between actual litigants suffering actual harm, and out of the realm of simply dictating general public policy.

"Standing" here was found by lawyers claiming they were speaking constantly to potential terrorist targets overseas, and their possibly-terrorists clients were too a-scared to speak freely.

Even if you buy that, the harm is suffered by the non-citizen terrorist clients, not by the American laywers themselves.

Basically, this is like the SCOFLA in the Bush v. Gore case, where a determined, ideological liberal politician posing as judge is willing to buy into any amount of bullshit necessary to get to the decision she wants to make.

Larwyn just wrote to me that Taranto is wondering if the plaintiffs' admissions here are grounds for getting FISA warrants on the lot of them.

(Whoops... just wet myself a little. Be right back.)

posted by Ace at 03:48 PM

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