It's not letting congress off the hook, it's painting a bullseye and applying pressure for them to pull the trigger. Until they do so, John Roberts has exclusive, unaccountable, lifetime power to shape the surveillance state.

While I too prefer code that compiles with -pedantic, I'm willing to forgive this author, and I don't see anything to suggest that the author believes that he is an intractable obstacle. I even think it's extraordinarily unlikely that any journalist sincerely believes that any single person is a permanently intractable obstacle in the government, so it makes the most sense to assume that was not the motivation.