And then the Court of Review did one more thing, something that has repercussions in today’s surveillance controversy. Not only could the FISA Court not tell the president how do to his work, the Court of Review said, but the president also had the “inherent authority” under the Constitution to conduct needed surveillance without obtaining any warrant — from the FISA Court or anyone else. Referring to an earlier case, known as Truong, which dealt with surveillance before FISA was passed, the Court of Review wrote: “The Truong court, as did all the other courts to have decided the issue, held that the President did have inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches to obtain foreign intelligence information. . . . We take for granted that the President does have that authority and, assuming that is so, FISA could not encroach on the President’s constitutional power.”
All the pontificating about it is way off the mark.
But, according to the author, Congress changed the rules with the passing of FISA, and since Congress changed the rule, then, hey, they MUST be right? /sarc
They jumped the gun when they "took this for granted", which is probably why SCOTUS never referred to it. To take their statement to its logical conclusion, FISA itself would have to be declared unconstitutional.
In any case, that statement from the FISA court was just dictum, because it was not pertinent to their ruling in the case (it would have been pertinent if the court had actually rebuffed the attempt to invoke FISA in that case, but that's not what it did). As such, it doesn't have any real precedential value.