There is poor reasoning, and then there is head-spinningly, jaw-droppingly poor reasoning. U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor's angry 44-page ruling against NSA terrorism surveillance is the latter, and constitutes little more than a political stunt, with ever-so-helpful declarations like "There are no hereditary Kings in America and no powers not created by the Constitution." The American Civil Liberties Union forum-shopped this lawsuit, handed it to a reliably left-liberal Jimmy Carter appointee in Detroit and got its desired result. It probably didn't count on the extreme intellectual embarrassment of Judge Diggs Taylor's opinion, however, which is now being noted by left and right alike.

The New York Times, of course, could be counted on to call the ruling -- which declares NSA surveillance unconstitutional, sides with the journalist-academic-lawye r plaintiffs who alleged that their rights were being monitored and issues a permanent injunction against the NSA program -- "a careful, thoroughly grounded opinion." But aside from the NYT-ACLU-Democratic Party axis, just about everyone commenting on the legal worth of the opinion acknowledges its exceptional logical poverty.

The Washington Post called the opinion "neither careful nor scholarly" and "long on throat-clearing sound bites." A writer for the hard-left Web site Daily Kos called it "poorly reasoned and totally unhelpful." "[A]n atrocity," wrote the liberal blogger Publius: "[p]remature, unsupported, and in violation of elementary civil procedure." "[T]here's no question that it's a poorly reasoned decision," Wake Forest University national-security law professor Bobby Chesney said. "[A] few pages of general ruminations about the Fourth Amendment (much of it incomplete and some of it simply incorrect)," wrote the legal scholar Orin Kerr. "I wouldn't accept this utterly unsupported, constitutionally and logically bankrupt collection of musings from a first-year law student, much less a new lawyer at my firm," wrote Brian Cunningham, a lawyer who served under both the Clinton and Bush administrations.

The Washington Times