Judges Gone Wild

Some federal judges are mad, and they're not going to take it any more.

Monday, one of the judges of the FISA court resigned in protest of Bush's warrantless wiretapping:

"This is a very big deal. Judges get upset with government lawyers all the time, but they don't resign in protest unless they're really offended to the point of saying they're being misused," said Kenneth C. Bass, a former senior Justice Department lawyer who oversaw such wiretap requests during the Carter administration.

Then yesterday, conservative darling Judge Michael Luttig of the 4th Circuit Appeals Court — the same court that ruled that Bush has the power to detain US citizens indefinitely as enemy combatants — bitch-slapped the administration for not taking terrorism seriously in the Padilla case:

They have left the impression that the government may even have come to the belief that the principle in reliance upon which it has detained Padilla for this time, that the President possesses the authority to detain enemy combatants who enter into this country for the purpose of attacking America and its citizens from within, can, in the end, yield to expediency with little or no cost to its conduct of the war against terror — an impression we would have thought the government likewise could ill afford to leave extant.

And now we learn that the rest of the judges on the FISA court are demanding to be briefed on Bush's wiretapping free-for-all; they're not sure what they'll do next:

The judges could, depending on their level of satisfaction with the answers, demand that the Justice Department produce proof that previous wiretaps were not tainted, according to government officials knowledgeable about the FISA court. Warrants obtained through secret surveillance could be thrown into question. One judge, speaking on the condition of anonymity, also said members could suggest disbanding the court in light of the president's suggestion that he has the power to bypass the court.

I guess a little blowback is to be expected, given how shabbily the administration has treated the "co-equal" judicial branch recently. Here's hoping that branch continues to assert itself against a lawless executive.