Bush maintains his contempt for laws in this backpedaling over FISA:

Senior Bush administration officials told Congress on Tuesday that they could not pledge that the administration would continue to seek warrants from a secret court for a domestic wiretapping program, as it agreed to do in January.

Rather, they argued that the president had the constitutional authority to decide for himself whether to conduct surveillance without warrants.

As a result of the January agreement, the administration said that the National Security Agency’s domestic spying program has been brought under the legal structure laid out in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires court-approved warrants for the wiretapping of American citizens and others inside the United States.

But on Tuesday, the senior officials, including Michael McConnell, the new director of national intelligence, said they believed that the president still had the authority under Article II of the Constitution to once again order the N.S.A. to conduct surveillance inside the country without warrants.

Needless to say, every non-hack non-idiot lawyer and judge in the country disagrees with Bush’s interpretation here. In fact, Bush has admitted ON TELEVISION that he’s a multiple felon, since every act of wiretapping without a FISA warrant is a crime. For some reason, his craven party is untroubled by this, and the Dems lack the cohesion of message to make the case publicly. This doesn’t change the facts, though: Bush is an admitted criminal, still sitting in the Oval Office, and still insisting he need not submit to any checks on executive power even when black letter law says otherwise.