President Bush has urged the lame-duck Congress to pass legislation restructuring the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and explicitly permitting the NSA Terrorist Surveillance program. As you might expect, Democratic leaders are, um, unenthusiastic about the plan: they have suggested that they'll filibuster any attempt to pass the legislation before the new Congress.

  Today the AP is reporting that the Bush Administration isn't giving up:

  The Bush administration has a backup plan. In speeches over the next few weeks, the Justice Department will launch a new campaign for the legislation by casting the choice as one between supporting the program or dropping it altogether - and appearing soft on al-Qaida.
  Attorney General Alberto Gonzales will make the eavesdropping program the focus of a Nov. 18 speech at the U.S. Air Force Academy. Kenneth L. Wainstein, assistant attorney general for the national security, will make a similar pitch Wednesday to the American Bar Association.

  The problem with this "backup plan," it seems to me, is that authorizing the Terrorist Surveillance Program is only one of several goals of the NSA legislation. The legislation does much more than authorize the program; it amounts to a dramatic shift in the relationship between executive and legislative power in the area of intelligence surveillance, and authorizing the TSP is only one consequence of that shift. I hope that Gonzales and Wainstein won't suggest that the choices are to pass this particular legislation or shut the program down. There are a lot of other options.