White House lies about FISA. No, really.

They've released a "fact sheet". It contains howlers like this: "Emergency authorizations under FISA also require probable cause and can create the same delays." Which is basically a lie. And this: "Unlike the Senate bill, the House bill was not coordinated with our intelligence professionals and it is does not give our intelligence agencies the tools they need to protect the Nation," which makes it sound as if House Democrats just patched together a bunch of arbitrary procedures without consulting intelligence experts, when what the White House really means is that Democrats did not take dictation from Mike McConnell about what the White House wants in its bill.

And then there's this: "Even though it has known for three months that its bill was unacceptable, the House has failed to take the necessary steps to achieve FISA legislation before the deadline it set to act." Loosely translated, the idea here is that, on national security issues, both the House and the Senate alike ought to shape their bills around the demands of the executive branch, or else accept responsibility for the veto and the resulting policy fallout. On heavily partisan issues such as FISA, when the Congress can not a veto, this actually gets the interplay between the first and second branches of government right. The problem is that, on this particular FISA issue, the policy fallout is fairly minor, the White House is lying about it, and their requirements for an "acceptable" bill are much too dangerous to be heeded.