Recent statements from Iraqi officials in favor of a timeline for U.S. withdrawal from their country have put John McCain is in a tough spot. McCain has made opposition to any such timeline a centerpiece of his campaign, insisting that U.S. withdrawal would be dictated only by “facts on the ground,” and attacking anyone who even used the word “timetable.”

In a primary debate back in January, McCain shamelessly demagogued this issue against Mitt Romney, badgering Romney with a hilariously tendentious interpretation of one of the former governor’s statements:

ROMNEY:I do not support [a timetable for a phased withdrawal from Iraq], never have. We’ve had — we’ve — and Senator McCain pointed to an interview I had back in April with ABC, when I said that our president and their prime minister should have timetables and milestones. We have timetables and milestones for progress that we’re making together. But I never suggested a date specific to withdraw… I’m opposed to setting a specific date for withdrawal.[...]

MCCAIN: Well, of course, he said he wanted a timetable. Before that, we have to understand that we lost the 2006 election and the Democrats thought that they had a mandate. They thought they had a mandate to get us out of Iraq.[...]

And the buzzword was “timetables, timetables.”

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Last night on MSNBC’s Coundown, George Washington law professor Jonathan Turley noted that just this week, a federal judge rejected President Bush’s claim that his “constitutional authority as commander in chief trumped” the FISA wiretapping law. Judge Vaughn Walker explicitly stated that the President is bound by FISA:

Congress appears clearly to have intended to — and did — establish the exclusive means for foreign intelligence activities to be conducted. Whatever power the executive may otherwise have had in this regard, FISA limits the power of the executive branch to conduct such activities and it limits the executive branch’s authority to assert the state secrets privilege in response to challenges to the legality of its foreign intelligence surveillance activities.

In other words, when Bush contravened the FISA law by authorizing warrantless wiretaps through the National Security Agency, he broke the law. Turley said last night that this is an “inconvenient fact” for many in Congress to admit:

Nobody wants to have a confrontation over the fact that the President committed a felony – not one, but at least 30 times. That’s a very inconvenient fact right now in Washington.

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Bush has acknowledged that he reauthorized his illegal wiretapping program “more than 30 times since the September the 11th attacks.”

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