An editorial in the NY Times today on yesterday’s NSA domestic spying ruling by a federal judge, was on the money today, saying that Judge Taylor managed to do what “535 members of Congress have so abysmally failed to do.”

She has reasserted the rule of law over a lawless administration and shown why issues of this kind belong within the constitutional process created more than two centuries ago to handle them.

Republican’s defenders of the Bush administration are decrying Taylor as a liberal judge appointed by Carter. Bush’s lawyers have been fighting to keep challenges like the ACLU’s challenge that Taylor ruled on out of the courts, ever since “Bush was forced to admit that he was spying on Americans’ telephone calls and e-mail without warrants.”

“It’s good news that this ruling exists at all,” say the NY times.

Mr. Bush’s lawyers tried to have the entire suit thrown out on national security grounds, a tactic they have used in an alarming number of cases. In one particularly appalling example, they persuaded federal judges to refuse to hear a lawsuit filed by an innocent German citizen of Lebanese birth who was snatched out of his private life, illegally imprisoned for five months and tortured by American jailers.

In an opposing view to the NY Times editorial, not surprisingly, the WaPo called the ruling “A Judicial Misfire.” Glenn Greenwald issues a scathing retort to the WaPo here.

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