If passing a FISA fix is "an urgent priority," as the president insisted today, one wonders why he won't agree to sign a temporary extension of the last fix that he thought was so "urgently" needed. As Harry Reid noted today, the president's refusal to sign any law that doesn't immunize telephone companies from their allegedly illegal behavior demonstrates the president's true priority ... and it isn't national security, as much as he tries to spin it that way.

If the final legislation does not include protection for the companies, a wave of lawsuits could reveal how the United States conducts surveillance “and give Al Qaeda and others a road map as to how to avoid surveillance,” Mr. Bush said.

Lawsuits might reveal that the administration conducted surveillance illegally, but that information is more harmful to the administration than it is helpful to Al Qaeda. As for a "road map," the president doesn't explain why classified information would miraculously become public simply because a lawsuit proceeds. Surely courts are positioned to balance the need to protect legitimate national secrets against the need to remedy violations of the law.

The president's back-up argument is that lawsuits are "unfair" to telcoms that were told by "government leaders" that "their assistance was legal and vital to national security." If such assurances were actually given (by whom exactly, we might wonder), and if telcoms had reason to believe the administration's interpretation of the law was reasonable, perhaps the telcoms would have a gripe. In the absence of litigation, however, none of those facts are established. And if the telcoms indeed acted legally, they have no need for immunity, a point stressed today by Senator Kennedy: