of judge-made common law. Federal common law can be displaced by statute. Consequently,grande sacoche longchamp pas cher, AHF contends the states secret privilege was preempted when Congress enacted FISA, which purports to regulate all national-security surveillance and allows lawsuits by those subjected to surveillance outside its terms. The court was thus confronted with the question that has animated scholarly debate since the New York Times exposed the NSA program in 2005: Does FISA, a mere statute, eviscerate the commander-in-chief’s authority under Article II of the Constitution to conduct surveillance he believes is necessary to protect the American people against foreign threats to national security — particularly in wartime?Bottom line: Chief Judge Walker concluded that FISA did preempt the state-secrets privilege — though, bound by the Ninth Circuit’s exclusion of the top-secret document, he dismissed the suit anyway. (Though it seems futile, he gave AHF leave to craft a new case using only public information.) The state secrets question is an interesting one all to itself. It is, however, merely a proxy for the underlying separation-of-powers clash. In effect, Walker held that Congress could and did remove the president’s power to conduct surveillance, that FISA eviscerated Article II of the Constitution.His treatment of that issue was wayward, to say the least,longchamp le pliage pas cher. Judge Walker elaborately traced the history leading to FISA’s enactment, including the 1976 Church Committee findings about domestic spying abuses and sober statements by various lawmakers about the perceived need to hyper-regulate electronic eavesdropping. That wrong was done, particularly in the Watergate era, cannot be gainsaid. But that does not mean the available remedies included a statutory slicing of executive power to guard against the possibility of future abuse. It was not Congress but the Constitution that vested the president with surveillance authority. Certainly, the president could be impeached for abusing it (as Nixon would have been had he fought on). But the power is a component of the office forged by Article II, not a creation of statute. To take a different example, it is not infrequent for the Supreme Court to hold acts of Congress unconstitutional — to say, in effect, that the legislature has acted lawlessly. Back in 1995, for example, the Court invalidated a gun law because,sac longchamps pliage l, the justices said, it exceeded Congress’s authority under the Commerce Clause. As a thought experiment, let’s imagine the Court had ended its opinion with the following: Because this abuse of power was flagrant, the Court fears it could recur. Therefore, we hold that Congress may no longer enact regulations of interstate and foreign commerce. Instead, that authority is delegated to the president, who should seek Congress’s advice in its execution. After all, the president is already responsible for enforcing federal law throughout the several states and for conducting the nation’s foreign affairs.Such a ruling would have been met by outrage, and Congress would pro Related articles: http://www.sufc.co.za/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=3290974&PID=3880124#3880124 http://www.sibsolidarnost.ru/index.php?option=com_xijc&view=captcha http://www.n26.net.cn/bbs/forum_posts.asp?TID=0&PID=0#0