Nevertheless, liberals fulminated. “We were stampeded,” senior House Judiciary Committee member Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) charged, “by administration fear-mongering and deception into signing away our rights.”

Not surprisingly, the legislation Nadler championed would limit the type of foreign intelligence that may be acquired without court approval. As White House officials note, it would impose “additional, wide-ranging, burdensome oversight requirements” on intelligence analysts. Trained linguists and analysts are already hard to come by; this approach would force them through endless legal hoops. Federal judges would be charged with making “operational determinations” best left to field commanders. Because no intelligence may be collected while appeals are pending, their decisions would be all but final.

The ramifications were spelled in a frightening floor exchange between Reps. Heather Wilson (R-N.M.) and Dan Lungren (R-Calif.):

Wilson: “If the United States Government inadvertently collects a phone call [where] Osama bin Laden himself calls into the United States, and … we didn’t expect him to call in to America, and we get lucky and we pick it up, and that phone call says to one of his cells in the United States, ‘Tomorrow is the day. Blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago,’ is it my understanding that under this bill … the intelligence agents couldn’t even tell law enforcement about that?”

Lungren: “Unless that cell had already been identified by us, we knew who they were, [and] we had already gotten legal permission to do that, we wouldn’t be able to do that.”

Wilson’s hypothetical example shouldn’t be dismissed. My colleague James Carafano has listed the 16 known terrorist plots, involving 57 admitted and accused terrorists, that have been thwarted since Sept. 11. At least a dozen of them seem to have an international connection that could have involved intercepted international communications. Some, such as the terrorist cell arrested in August 2004 for plotting to use a radiological “dirty bomb” to unleash a “memorable black day of terror” against leading financial targets, could have killed thousands.

This prompts a good question from Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-N.J.). “Why are we on the floor debating … legislation that essentially amounts to unilateral disarmament on our part?”