Uh Oh, Another "Compromise"

According to both the Washington Post and New York Times, the three Republican Senators (Sununu, Craig, and Murkowski) who had previously expressed concerns about the Specter "compromise" surveillance bill, have reached a tentative agreement with the White House to amend the bill. Unfortunately, it's not clear from either article just what this compromise entails.
The Times reports the following:

Republican leaders said Monday that they had reached a tentative agreement to garner political support for legislation on domestic surveillance, in part by sidestepping the question of whether the president has the constitutional authority to order wiretapping without a court order.

There was wide disagreement about the plan's impact. Supporters billed the most recent version as a way of requiring a court order for most domestic wiretaps. But civil rights advocates and even some administration officials suggested that it would maintain the status quo in allowing the continuation of wiretapping without warrants under a program approved by President Bush.

Senator Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican who leads the Judiciary Committee, said that in recent negotiations, the White House had agreed to delete language from his bill that critics said would have implicitly acknowledged the president's constitutional authority to order wiretapping without a warrant.

I presume that's a reference to this language from the Specter bill:

Nothing in this Act shall be construed to limit the constitutional authority of the President to collect intelligence with respect to foreign powers and agents of foreign powers.

Specter's bill would have inserted this language in the place of FISA's exclusivity clause, a move that would have rendered FISA entirely meaningless. If that language is now gone, it's a step in the right direction, but the more important question is whether the exclusivity clause has been put back in. If not, the bill will likely accomplish sub silencio what it previously did explicitly, i.e., allow the president to conduct surveillance outside of FISA's framework.

Until the actual text of the new bill is available, it's probably not worth writing much more at the moment. Given recent history, however, I'm highly skeptical that these fiercely independent Republican Senators were able to extract any meaningful concessions from the White House.

If anyone has a link to the text of the bill, please email me or post it in the comments.