Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) has done some dumb things in his time, like trying to prevent people from "inducement" of infringement from copyright and then citing "the children" to support that bill (i.e., "We need to create a new theory of copyright liability so that kids won't have to deal with pornography on file-sharing networks. Can I get a woot-woot?")

But now, Hatch has forever earned my ire. In Cedar City, Utah, today, Hatch defended President Bush's illegal, poorly-justified, warrantless wiretapping on U.S. citizens:

"They're moaning and groaning in Congress because he didn't abide by what's called the FISA Act, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. That act is very important, but it was enacted in 1978 and it is not applicable to today's world," Hatch said. "The president is using every methodology that we know ... to try to track down those al-Qaida people or people affiliated with al-Qaida."

What? If FISA "is not applicable in today's world," then why did the USA PATRIOT Act amend FISA so that it became applicable to today's world? One of the good things the USA PATRIOT Act did was to bring FISA up-to-date so that the federal government could legally engage in foreign intelligence surveillance on packet-switched networks (i.e., the Internet), something that wasn't expressly allowed because FISA was enacted before the Internet. Hatch is wrong: FISA is not irrelevant.

What is Hatch doing? Either we repeal the USA PATRIOT Act and don't amend FISA, then engage in illegal wiretapping because FISA "is not applicable in today's world," or we don't repeal the USA PATRIOT Act and stop engaging in warrantless wiretapping. Bush wants both the USA PATRIOT Act and warrantless wiretapping.

FISA is applicable to today's world, but Hatch is so busy trying to play Bush apologist (so that the RNC won't destroy him when he goes up for re-election this year; cf. John McCain) that he ignores the primary problem with the Bush program: it's warrantless. Saying that FISA is irrelevant ignores the fact that the president broke the law. Arguing that a law is irrelevant and therefore shouldn't be followed isn't a defense for outright breaking it. If FISA were so irrelevant, why not amend it to make it more relevant, or to bring the president's wiretapping activities within the boundaries of the law? I'll tell you why: because the president is engaging in activities that would be reprehensible even to congressional Republicans, so much so that he knows he couldn't get support for such amendments, so he decided to go behind everyone else's backs.

Why couldn't he just go to a FISA court? Again, this is not an issue of "we need to catch the terrorists now; the FISA court moves too slowly." FISA allows the president to engage in wiretapping for up to 72 hours without a warrant, provided a warrant request is submitted to the FISA court within 72 hours. But even that wasn't good enough for Bush. Why? Presumably because his activities were so illegal that even the FISA court -- which has denied a total of four warrant applications since 1979 -- would turn it down. Bush couldn't risk the FISA court rejecting his wiretapping program, since they would then have known about its existence.

For defending Bush's illegal warrantless surveillance program and then purposely misrepresenting the issue, Orrin Hatch is a SEDHE Villain of the Forever.