Glenn Greenwald cuts to the chase:

Jonathan Turley (who, for those with the new law professor fetish, is one at George Washington University) puts his finger on why there is so much desire to focus on the “quality” of Judge Taylor’s written opinion while all but ignoring the fact that a federal court just declared that the President of the United States has been repeatedly violating federal criminal laws, and still is:

The far more difficult question is the implication of Taylor’s ruling. If this court is upheld or other courts follow suit, it will leave us with a most unpleasant issue that Democrats and Republicans alike have sought to avoid.

Here it is: If this program is unlawful, federal law expressly makes the ordering of surveillance under the program a federal felony. That would mean that the president could be guilty of no fewer than 30 felonies in office. Moreover, it is not only illegal for a president to order such surveillance, it is illegal for other government officials to carry out such an order.

For people working in government, this opinion may lead to some collar tugging. If Taylor’s decision is upheld or other courts reject the program, will the president promise to pardon those he ordered to carry out unlawful surveillance? The question of the president’s possible criminal acts has long been the pig in the parlor that polite people in Congress refused to acknowledge.

Legal battles which involve the government typically are waged over abstract questions as to whether a particular government action (a new law or a President’s order) is invalid as being unconstitutional. While such battles can generate substantial emotion, they do not typically implicate government officials personally.

But the FISA ruling from Judge Taylor is of a much different nature. The question being decided by NSA cases is, effectively, whether George Bush and his top officials, along with those at the NSA following his orders by eavesdropping without judicial approval, are guilty of felonies. As Professor Turley notes, very few people actually believe the answer to that question is difficult to discern:

While Atty. Gen. Alberto Gonzales insists that the legal authority for the program is clear and filed a notice of appeal with the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, few experts outside of the Bush administration support the program. To the contrary, federal law seems perfectly clear in prohibiting warrantless surveillance.

This has been the most bizarre part of the NSA scandal all along: the President got caught red-handed violating an extremely clear law — he admitted to engaging in the very behavior which that law says is a felony punishable by up to 5 years in prison and a $10,000 fine — and yet official Washington (the political and pundit classes) simply decided to pretend that wasn’t the case.

They agreed to acquiesce to the administration’s fiction that there are some sort of complex and difficult legal questions with which one must grapple, and that only shrill partisans say that the President is violating the criminal law. And thus, a Washington ruling class which reveled in subpoenas and criminal investigations over such towering matters as Whitewater, Vince Foster and Monica Lewkinsky has collectively decided that talk of criminality on the part of the President for how he is spying on Americans is imprudent and unserious.