Lawless Wiretaps Into Lawful

I find it a sad when everyone knows something is illegal, and rather then investigating into it and dealing penalties if they do apply, they instead would make a program into a legal exercise.
Wired reported that the White House is close to making an agreement to make the controversial warrantless NSA wiretaps into a lawful procedure (story: http://www.wired.com/news/wireservice/0,71238-0.html?tw=rss.index). The Bush Administration still asserts that they already have such powers in law. You know, the one that says that the President can do anything, just as long as it is loosely connected to terrorism (if you don't remember, it isn't your memory, it's theirs).
Arlen Specter said in this article that the program is illegal, as it avoids the legal requirement of going to the FISA court (note on the "warrantless" part of the controversy), but still said in the article:

"We're getting close with the discussions with the White House, I think, to having the wiretapping issue submitted to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court."

Wait, he wants the new law to do the EXACT SAME THING as the law already says. Ludicrous, to say the least. Republicans want to run away and/or denouce the President as a Republican, but dont' want to anything substantive, to a point of redundancy.
This should be a case of people doing the right thing and bucking their party/party leader, not a prime example of how terrible a single-party government can be.