Specter trying to legislate both sides of Constitution.

According to MSNBC/AP, Arlen Specter is ready to introduce legislation to authorize Congress "to undertake judicial review of [presidential] signing statements with the view to having the president's acts declared unconstitutional."

But at the same time, Specter's so-called 'compromise bill' regarding the administration's NSA / domestic spying activities provides the administration legal cover and additional powers to prevent any oversight or legal action against the spy program.

The juxtaposition of these bills leads me to believe that Arlen Specter now fears how much damage would be done to the government and administration (and possibly party) should the full details of the spying activities become public. His bills, when considered together, would nullify any public disclosure of the spying program, but also seek to quash the President's ability to arbitrarily circumvent Congressional checks and balances via a signing statement. There would also be some discussion of the 'constitutionality' of both the spy program and signing statements, which I'm guess would be ambiguous at best.

The scope of the domestic spying--the cooperation or coercion of major international communications and financial companies, those companies implication that customers may have arbitrarily agreed to have their data mined or shared on a mass scale simply by being customers, and the innuendo that spying may have been carried out upon members of the press and/or political rivals--demand a full disclosure of the depth and breadth of this program.

Instead Arlen Specter is circling the wagons to prevent that disclosure while appearing to try to partially limit the executive branch's ability to do so secretly and without Congressional limitations. But the administration comes out the winner in that case, in that they would have been able to carry out these likely illegal activities, then given a 'get out of jail free card' by Congress.