Scalia said the high court originally ruled that there were no constitutional prohibitions on wiretaps because conversations were not explicitly granted privacy protection under the Fourth Amendment, which protects against Americans against unreasonable search and seizure of "their persons, houses, papers, and effects."

That 1928 opinion, in Olmstead v. U.S., was overturned nearly 40 years later by the Warren court, which found, Scalia said, "there's a generalized right of privacy that comes from penumbras and emanations, blah blah blah, garbage."

"The consequence of that is that whether the NSA can do the stuff it's been doing ... which used to be a question for the people ... will now be resolved by the branch of government that knows the least about the issues in question, the branch that knows the least about the extent of the threat against which the wiretapping is directed," he said.

Sure sounds like a guy who really cares about Constitutional rights and takes his obligation to adjudicate them seriously.

This idea that the courts are the least equipped body to address these issues is "blah, blah, blah, garbage." The fact is that individual rights supposedly protected by the Constitution were not taken seriously in this country until the Supreme Court started taking them seriously.

The Court has a better process of evaluating issues related to Constitutional rights than the other two branches, because the members of the court are experts on the Constitution, and the court has a formal process for evaluating different perspectives on issues that makes it difficult to ignore inconvenient information or disfavored points of view.

If only the hearings and testimony that occur in the Senate were taken half as seriously as the filings that the Supreme Court receives. In fact they are theater, in which predetermined outcomes are justified through stacked witness lists and phony questions.

We know that formal, adversarial processes produce carefully considered results - we should leverage that knowledge more, not less.