President Bush defended his approval of spying on Americans without a court order by saying it was a "necessary part" of his job.

No, Mr. President, your job is to protect and uphold the Constitution — not to unilaterally abort it.

While it's true we are a nation at war, the president's job should not be to compromise the freedoms we have come to expect in this country. The president insists that every action he has taken is legal — and his lawyers may be able to make that case. But in this country the courts and Congress exist to provide oversight and to assure the democratic process is consulted before our government takes any extraordinary actions that strip away individual freedoms.

But let's not blame the president exclusively for the erosion of civil liberties in our country. Insensitivity to the Bill of Rights has grown steadily throughout the years.

We need only point to the FBI's secret files on the late U.S. Rep. Patsy Mink, D-Hawai'i, recently unearthed by The Advertiser's use of the Freedom of Information Act. The government kept a close eye on Mink during the Cold War.

It was typical of the the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover, which engaged in such secret and useless surveillance of innocent individuals such as Mink and even the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

More recently, safeguards against such transgressions seem to have disappeared. Even the Clinton administration has contributed. The very practice of allowing a nationwide search based on the approval by a single judge was passed during the Clinton years.

Still, the Bush administration has accelerated the sense of a decline in freedom, and turned it into an art form. By using the fight against terrorism as a handy justification, and arguing so forcefully for it, the administration even has some Americans convinced that any compromise of freedom is quite normal.

It shouldn't be. It's a war on terror, not a war on Americans.