Tabarrok is pissed a Liberals

Over at Marginal Revolution Alex offers a new line of defense for the President's right to torture and spy.

Liberals are claiming that President Bush has violated constitutional
restrictions on torture and spying on Americans. Don't they understand that the
constitution is a living document that must be reinterpreted in light of new
events and understandings? An originalist reading of the constitution would
throw us back into the primitive past when the minimum wage was
unconstitutional. Fortunately, conservatives know that constitutional
interpretation must change with the times and never more so than now. We live in
a different world. The Founding Fathers may have been great in their time but
they did not face the problems that we face today and we should not be bound by
their 18th century ideas of liberty and executive tyran

My problem with this is not that I think the Constitution should be interpreted strictly and conservatives do not support Bush's wire-tapping because they have some enlighted view of constitutional law. The problem is I don't trust the government to do things without transperancy or at least oversight. We have not yet heard a reason why these particular wire-taps had to be done without FISA court approval. I do not suspect these wiretaps are being grieviously abused. I bet they could have gotten approval from judge for all of the necessary wiretaps, but they just don't see it as necessary.