The Bureaucracy Made Me Do It

The fascinating thing about following the workings of the federal government for any length of time is that you can scratch almost any Washington scandal and eventually you'll find somebody who says that it's all the bureaucracy's fault. Here's Byron York in National Review Online on why President Bush bypassed the special Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court to order electronic surveillance of communications between Americans on U.S. soil and persons overseas.

In short, it appears that he was trying to shake the bureaucracy into action. The September 11 Commission report pointed to a deeply entrenched it's-not-my-job mentality within the National Security Agency that led the organization to shy away from aggressive antiterrorism surveillance.

York also argues that the fact that the FISA court generally speedily deals with applications for wiretaps is beside the point. The real problem, he says, is that sometimes it takes days or weeks for bureaucrats to put together applications to present to the court. Maybe the Bush White House, which thus far has been relying on the argument that the president simply had the legal authority to bypass FISA if he felt like it, might want to try out this bureaucracy-made-me-do-it defense. (Thanks to Slate's Dahlia Lithwick for the link to York's piece.)