A lawsuit in San Francisco federal court accusing AT&T of illegally collaborating with the Bush administration's electronic surveillance of U.S. citizens would be transferred to a secret court accessible only to the government under new legislation backed by the White House.

A provision of the bill introduced Thursday by Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, would allow the government to move the AT&T case and all other lawsuits involving the surveillance program to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review in Washington.

The three-judge court meets behind closed doors and hears arguments only from the Justice Department. The court was created in 1978 to consider government appeals from another secret tribunal that reviews requests for wiretaps and searches of foreign agents. Thousands of such requests were uniformly granted until 2003, when the tribunal rejected a Bush administration claim of new surveillance powers under the USA Patriot Act.

Will Specter next file a bill to move the Wilson case to some secret court so the plaintiffs cannot participate solely to protect Vice President Cheney from embarrassment?

Not to worry: No responsible federal judge would hold that the government can deprive citizens of due process and a public hearing where such important civil liberties are involved. There is the little problem of "petition government for redress of grievances" in the First Amendment which I thought protected access to the courts in an adversarial proceeding.

But that only begs the question, doesn't it? One of the Federalist Society and Neo-Con credos involves depriving federal courts of jurisdiction to protect turf, unless, of course, it is something like the Terry Schiavo case where they want a federal court to do their bidding.

And so it goes....