This is not some esoteric legal theory—it's basic high school civics. But apparently even that level of understanding is either over the head of or simply not of interest to the mainstream media. Instead of a debate over the real question—whether a president is or is not required to follow laws—America is being treated to a pro-national-security versus anti-national-security storyline wholly divorced from reality.

As an example, in a bantering exchange on NBC's Today show, Katie Couric asked Tim Russert, "Is this going to be a case of a debate by legal analysts and constitutional scholars versus Americans, who say civil liberties are important, but we don't want another September 11?" And Russert replied, "Exactly"—as if the only people who care about civil liberties and privacy are a few university eggheads.

The pundits in our midst did exactly the same thing. Take conservative bloviator William Kristol, who is somehow still given a media platform as a legitimate commentator, even though he pushed the false WMD case for the Iraq War. The Washington Post granted him space on its editorial pages to pen a fawning congratulation to President Bush for trampling upon the Constitution in what we are expected to believe—without any proof—was simply an honest White House effort to protect national security. Kristol also appeared on a Fox News Sunday show demanding to know why President Bill Clinton hadn't ordered the same kind of illegal surveillance when he was in office.

Not surprisingly, the right-wing Democratic Leadership Council also got into the act. Undermining congressional Democrats like Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI), who courageously demanded answers from the president, the DLC's Marshall Wittman published a screed on his blog saying that Bush's law-breaking was entirely justified, even though the public still hasn't been given one justification that holds water. Once again dishonestly trying to turn the situation into a pro-national-security versus anti-national-security debate, he attacked critics of the president as "act[ing] as if the [terrorist] threat has gone away."

Wittman, a former Christian Coalition staffer and GOP operative who now purports to speak for Democrats, claimed that the FISA warrant process is "often burdensome and slow with a relatively high standard of proof." He apparently felt comfortable pontificating as an expert even though he was totally oblivious to the FISA courts' retroactive privileges, which ensure expeditious surveillance; to the tiny number of warrants that have ever been rejected; and to the reality that, as the on-line magazine Slate noted back in 2003, there is "no need for evidence or probable cause" to get a warrant from a FISA court in the first place.

Topping off this display of ignorance, Wittman claimed that "there is absolutely no evidence" that the president was breaking the law to perform surveillance on his political enemies—again, ignoring all of the recent news about the administration's doing just that: spying on anti-war, environmental, civil rights and anti-poverty groups.

"AUTHORIZING" LAWBREAKING—Perhaps most interesting of all in the Beltway coverage of the spying issue was the language employed to describe what had happened. From the moment the story broke, reporters parroted the White House's terminology—terminology specifically crafted to make it sound as if Bush's patently illegal actions had a quasi-legal basis.

For instance, the New York Times told us that Bush "secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans." The paper also referred to "the powers granted the NSA by President Bush." The word authorize is defined as "to grant power or authority to," and the word grant is the act of giving something one has. The use of these terms is a (perhaps subconscious) effort by the media/political establishment to make the public assume that Bush had the right to grant something when he did not.

This framing bled into other major media as well. Just after the spying situation blew up, the Associated Press reported that President Bush, in his weekly radio address, said that "he has no intention of stopping his personal authorizations of a post-September 11 secret eavesdropping program in the U.S." That's right: "his personal authorizations," as if he can just go around "authorizing" whatever he wants, without regard to the fact that such powers are not his to bestow.

The tragedy of it all is that the most critical question has never been answered—or even asked: If the president is permitted to break this law with no concrete justification at all, what law isn't he allowed to break? Can he rob a convenience store if he feels like it? Can he pocket taxpayer money? Or, how about carrying out assassinations of his political enemies? Can he do that, as long as he simply utters the phrase "national security" or "9/11" over and over, even if he never proves that what he's doing has anything to do with actual national security?

That is the question that cuts to the heart of whether the "rule of law" actually means anything anymore. As Senator Chuck Hagel (R-NE) said recently, "No president is above the law. We are a nation of laws and no president, majority leader, or chief justice of the Supreme Court can unilaterally or arbitrarily avoid a law or dismiss a law."

Or can they? Americans are waiting for an answer.