[AnimalMuppet]

Neither am I cheering for it. Don't put words in my mouth.

I am seriously asking whether being flat-out unconstitutional is worse than building a (legislated and approved) backdoor around the constitution, yes.

I mean, better than both would be to just follow the constitution, but that wasn't the question.

[temporarely]

Well, you are asserting a binary choice here which is questionable and implies that unless we grant spooks legal OK for some violations of the constitution they are free to ignore the entire matter. If a government agency is acting in violation of constitution then there are legal and constitutional remedies to make sure the said agencies act according to the law of the land.

[hypothesis]

Please note that at no point I said that you specifically cheered, so no need to project. It’s a threaded topic.

As you noticed, following constitution is apparently not an option here. Being unconstitutional and ignored, there was at least some hope for improvement, but codification gave us a clear answer that elected representatives are, at best, only selectively interested in supporting constitution.