A conservative for impeachment.

• Author: Gilmore, Brian
• Position: Bruce Fein

Bruce Fein reminds me of Jerry Lewis playing Professor Julius Kelp in the 1963 comedy classic The Nutty Professor. Intellectually astute and quick-witted, Fein, like Lewis as Kelp, is underestimated because of his peculiar style.

But the stakes are too high to dismiss Fein simply for being didactic or eccentric. In fact, he's breaking conservative rank to defend our Constitution.

Fein has a solid Republican resume. He served as an associate deputy attorney general in the Reagan Administration, where he helped formulate conservative arguments on key legal issues that are still current today. He had stints as a resident scholar at the Heritage Foundation and an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He also writes a regular column for The Washington Times newspaper, one of the country's leading conservative dailies.

But his bona tides don't end there.

He has trashed the Roe v. Wade abortion decision, stating that it required a "hallucinogenic intellectual flight" on the part of Justice Harry Blackmun to draft the opinion. "President George W. Bush should pack the United States Supreme Court with philosophical clones of Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas and defeated nominee Robert H. Bork," he wrote in Washington Lawyer in February 2005. He voted for Bush in 2000 and 2004, and he applauded the nomination of John Roberts as Bush's "finest hour."

So why has Fein been collaborating with the ACLU and providing damning testimony to the Senate about President Bush? Why is he for censuring the President and even, perhaps, impeaching him?

This is what did it: The disclosure that the National Security Agency (NSA) is engaged in the domestic wiretapping of American citizens in the United States without first obtaining warrants. The Bush Administration had crossed the line. Within twenty-four hours, Fein went into constitutional combat mode. And he hasn't stopped since.

For Fein, there is nothing really to debate; the law is settled. In 1978, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, permitting the government to conduct electronic surveillance on citizens in the United States if it first gets a warrant from the FISA court, which exists for that reason only. The FISA court rarely has denied such a request.

But the NSA has repeatedly conducted such surveillance without going to the FISA court for warrants. Every forty-five days, President Bush has been issuing Executive Orders saying that it is within his...