Well, this raises a delicate question. Before there was Mark Steyn, there was and remains George Will. And I think many of us in the business of opinion journalism respect his work over a long period of time. But I’m beginning to worry if he’s going Pat Buchanan on us [italics mine], Mark Steyn. Today he wrote a column blasting the idea that the authorization for the use of military force somehow authorized the president to conduct surveillance on al Qaeda. And Andrew McCarthy answered this at National Review. But it’s an absurd column by one of the elder statesmen of conservatism. What’s going on? ~Hugh Hewitt

Via Clark Stooksbury.

Here is part of George Will’s “absurd” column:

But, then, perhaps no future president will ask for such congressional involvement in the gravest decision government makes — going to war. Why would future presidents ask, if the present administration successfully asserts its current doctrine? It is that whenever the nation is at war, the other two branches of government have a radically diminished pertinence to governance, and the president determines what that pertinence shall be. This monarchical doctrine emerges from the administration’s stance that warrantless surveillance by the National Security Agency targeting American citizens on American soil is a legal exercise of the president’s inherent powers as commander in chief, even though it violates the clear language of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which was written to regulate wartime surveillance.

Will does a great job pointing to the myriad flaws in the administration’s argument, though he is rather late in getting around to it (the story was over two months old when Will wrote this on 2/16). Basically, what Will says is not particularly provocative or absurd. It is rather limited, actually, and only someone like Hugh Hewitt of “low-brow rabble-rousing” fame would regard it as being similar to anything Mr. Buchanan has to say. (In fact, not that the uninformed Hewitt would know this, Mr. Buchanan’s view of the President’s surveillance powers in “wartime” is unfortunately a lot closer to that of Hewitt and Steyn than to George Will.)

Will tracks down the inconsistencies in the administration position pretty quickly, points them out as inconsistencies and warns that, if the President has the power he claims to have, Congress and, well, the law are pretty much superfluous and unnecessary. At bottom, the President is not freed of his obligation as chief executive to enforce and, of necessity, respect and obey the laws just because “there is a war on.”

But Will’s warning ultimately lacks any real teeth, because he wants Congress to rubber stamp whatever Mr. Bush did to make it all neat and legal from here on out. No muss, no fuss, and definitely no crazy impeachment talk–all of that is left unsaid, but Will obviously does not want to be mistaken for someone like me. Unfortunately for him, Hugh Hewitt and Mark Steyn are not quite quick enough to pick up on his establishment irony.

Pardon me if I fail to see the barn-burning radicalism and Buchananesque rebellion of George Will. It is classic Will in the Bush years: talking up a tremendously serious (if George Will became any more serious, I think he would explode) criticism of some official Republican line that ultimately collapses back into partisan loyalty and full support for the administration. Yes, the President broke the law, which was wrong, but not really that wrong, because he was doing good. So let’s just tie up those legal loose ends and ignore that Mr. Bush believes he is an autocrat with unlimited power!

Of course, legally there is no war on right now–not that Will would go this far. The AUMF (a hideous-sounding acronym for the Sept. 14, 2001 resolution “authorising” military force) is not a declaration of war, and specifically only authorised the President to retaliate against those found to be responsible for September 11. If the President is not above the law even in actual “wartime,” he certainly is not in pseudo-wartime. Mr. Bush broke the law in this case (as he has done on other occasions–the number of occasions depends on how strict you are with your reading of the Constitution). He does not have the inherent powers he claims reside mystically in the office of the Presidency. Inherent powers under our system do not exist.