More NRO, News Central

 K-Lo, not that I would ever toot my own flute, but that Times article goes on to say:

Mr. McCain had previously stopped short of endorsing the view that Mr. Bush’s program of surveillance without warrants was lawful all along because a president’s wartime powers can trump statutory limits.

Andrew C. McCarthy, a National Review columnist who has defended the administration’s legal theories, wrote that Mr. Holtz-Eakin’s statement “implicitly shows Senator McCain’s thinking has changed as time has gone on and he has educated himself on this issue.” …

The reaction to Mr. Holtz-Eakin’s statement is the latest link in a chain of disputes over Mr. McCain’s positions on surveillance over the past two weeks.

On May 23, the McCain campaign sent a volunteer lawyer, Chuck Fish, to be the candidate’s surrogate at a conference on computer policy. Mr. Fish spoke at a panel discussion on whether phone and Internet companies should be granted immunity from lawsuits for having helped Mr. Bush’s surveillance program.

Mr. Fish suggested that Mr. McCain wanted to impose conditions — like Congressional hearings — that would ensure that such “forgiveness” would not signal that the telecoms should feel free to disregard communications privacy laws in the future if a president tells them to.

After Wired magazine wrote about Mr. Fish’s remarks on its blog, raising the question of whether Mr. McCain’s position had become more skeptical about immunity, the McCain campaign put out a statement saying that Mr. Fish was mistaken. Mr. McCain supported ending the lawsuits without conditions and his position had not changed, the campaign said.

On May 29, The Washington Post quoted Mr. Holtz-Eakin as saying that Mr. McCain did not want the telecoms “put into this position again” and that “there must be clear guidelines for their participation and sufficient vetting” in any future situation.

Mr. Holtz-Eakin’s comments in turn drew fire from Mr. McCarthy. In a blog posting on the National Review Web site, he demanded to know whether Mr. McCain believes the Constitution authorizes a president to lawfully go “arguably beyond what is prescribed in a statute” during a national security crisis.

Mr. Holtz-Eakin laid out Mr. McCain’s position on the president’s claimed constitutional powers to bypass surveillance laws in a letter to Mr. McCarthy, who this week called the statement “extremely significant” and said it “marks a welcome evolution on the senator’s thinking about executive power.”

ME:  Though the Times is obviously dismissing me as an administration hack, I have never worked for the administration (at least any more than I worked for the Clinton administration in the sense that I was a prosecutor during Clinton’s term … and Bush 41′s … and Reagan’s).  As anyone who cares to read my stuff knows, I do not defend the Bush administration’s legal (or other) theories unless I think they are sound.  And, in fact, my legal theory about FISA differs significantly from the administration’s:  I think FISA is a bad law and that the Constitution does not require probable cause for a national-security search; the administration may think FISA is flawed but generally supports it and has taken the poorly reasoned position that the Fourth Amendment may require probable cause for a national-security search.

In any event, the comments the Times attributes to me at the end of the report are mined from an article published earlier this week, in which I responded to Mr. Holtz-Eakin’s letter to me (the letter that was posted on NRO and that has the Gray Lady spun up this morning).  That article is here.