Such are the stakes in the current debate over whether President Bush has acted ultra vires— beyond his legal powers, even in violation of the Constitution he swore to uphold — in ordering surveillance for what is called national security. His defenders appeal to the president’s “implied powers,” the right-wing answer to liberalism’s “penumbras formed by emanations” as a device for infinitely elastic interpretations of plain words, words their authors mistakenly assumed anyone could understand, even an ordinary Yale graduate. ~Joseph Sobran