Jane Harman is one of the few Dems in the House that seems to put our country before the RATS agendas. She's from California too, hard to believe.
Another surprise today someone posted...........
John Schmidt served under President Clinton from 1994 to 1997 as the associate attorney general of the United States.
http://tinyurl.com/8q8mt
Excerpt........
President had legal authority to OK taps
By John Schmidt
Published December 21, 2005
President Bush's post- Sept. 11, 2001, authorization to the National Security Agency to carry out electronic surveillance into private phone calls and e-mails is consistent with court decisions and with the positions of the Justice Department under prior presidents.
The president authorized the NSA program in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks on America. An identifiable group, Al Qaeda, was responsible and believed to be planning future attacks in the United States. Electronic surveillance of communications to or from those who might plausibly be members of or in contact with Al Qaeda was probably the only means of obtaining information about what its members were planning next. No one except the president and the few officials with access to the NSA program can know how valuable such surveillance has been in protecting the nation.
In the Supreme Court's 1972 Keith decision holding that the president does not have inherent authority to order wiretapping without warrants to combat domestic threats, the court said explicitly that it was not questioning the president's authority to take such action in response to threats from abroad.
Four federal courts of appeal subsequently faced the issue squarely and held that the president has inherent authority to authorize wiretapping for foreign intelligence purposes without judicial warrant.
Harman represents a district with a lot of defense and space industry engineers and such living in it. But she has always been tough on defense and foreign policy matters, and need not now since the district was gerrymandered to make it unmarginal. So chalk it up to actual conviction.