With friends like these....

Carl Levin, a Senator trusted and admired by liberal Democrats, sells us out on the domestic phone tap spying issue.

Glen Greenwald has the goods.

Below are a couple of paragraphs and a link. Greenwald first posts a transcript of a Levin interview. The quoted paragraph refers to the interview.

...The whole interview is like that. I just picked the worst of it. Carl Levin obviously believes that it is perfectly acceptable for the President to break the law just as long as it turns out that his illegal conduct is driven by good intentions. ...

...If it turns out that they were not abusing the eavesdropping power, then it is perfectly fine with Sen. Levin if the President broke the law. If the President broke the law, then the duty of the Senate is to "modify the law in order to make it legal" because, after all, the President broke the law for the "right reasons." As Daniel Webster warned: "Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority. It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions." ...

LINK

Great quote from Webster.