Over the past few days, I’ve witnessed some confusion on the possibility of the United States government taking action against WikiLeaks for any potential illegal action they might have committed in their recent divulging of thousands of secret State Department cables. As a result, I thought it would be worthwhile to take a minute and clear up some misconceptions.

WikiLeaks supporters are currently up in arms, saying the United States has no grounds to prosecute the organization or its founder, Julian Assange — and they may be right about that. The fact of the matter is, like all criminal cases, it will depend on what the government can prove in a court of law.

The problem with many of the WikiLeaks apologists’ arguments is that they’re often predicated on a deep misunderstanding of a landmark Supreme Court decision — New York Times Co. v. United States, or the “Pentagon Papers” case. According to the arguments I’ve heard, WikiLeakers believes the precedent set by the court’s Pentagon Papers ruling — which held that the government could not legally prevent The New York Times from publishing a news story about leaked top-secret military documents — also prevents the government from pursuing legal action against Assange and/or WikiLeaks in this latest snafu.

On the surface, this seems like a reasonable line of argument. However, as with most things, we need to dig deeper to really understand the forces at work here.

Because they don’t have spirited, culturally awesome arguments like this one between British Prime Minister David Cameron and a member of parliament, where they pretty much just throw out old Smiths songs as a way of bickering about Cameron’s proposed budget cuts:

MP Kerry McCarthy: “As someone who claims to be an avid fan of The Smiths, the Prime Minister will no doubt be rather upset this week that both Morrissey and Johnny Marr have banned him from liking them. The Smiths are, of course, the archetypal students’ band. If he wins tomorrow night’s vote [on tuition fees], what songs does he think students will be listening to? ‘Miserable Lie,’ ‘I Don’t Owe You Anything’ or ‘Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now?’”

Cameron: “I accept that if I turned up I probably wouldn’t get ‘This Charming Man,’ and if I went with the Foreign Secretary [William Hague] it would probably be ‘William It Was Really Nothing.’”

David Cameron and an MP rapping about the Smiths in public? As part of a policy exchange? Sign me up!

Of course, the British parliament has always been noticeably more, um, lively and exciting than their American counterparts. In short, the House of Commons is basically the political equivalent of a rap battle.

We don’t do that in the United States. In fact, we pretty much do the opposite — we let our elected representatives pontificate ad nauseum to a near-empty chamber until they quite literally put people to sleep. But that doesn’t mean there’s not an appetite for this kind of robust debate in American politics.

I was a little worried about the post I wrote yesterday on President Obama’s pay freeze. After all, he announced the freeze a few days back — maybe it was all talked out by the time I got around to it? Turns out that wasn’t the case.

I consider The Washington Post‘s Ezra Klein to be one of the best bloggers around — the way he takes complicated policy minutiae and consistently distills them into engaging, highly informative masterpieces is truly stunning. And the best thing about Ezra is that, while he is unapologetically liberal, he’s not a hack. He’s genuinely more interested in good policy than political ideology — and while he believes liberal solutions to problems are generally more effective, he’s open-minded and intellectually honest enough to consider ideas from all sides. In other words, he’s pretty much my hero (if you couldn’t already tell.)

So wasn’t I surprised when, at 2:06 p.m. MST today, the great Ezra Klein posted this excellent piece basically articulating the same argument I made yesterday — that the Obama administration is being played like a fiddle by the Republicans because they don’t know how (or just flat-out refuse) to negotiate in a way that’s politically advantageous. Of course, he did the argument far more justice than I did — and wrote it a thousand times better — but it’s still kind of fun to quasi-scoop your idol every once in a blue moon. Either way, Ezra’s post is definitely worth your time and then some.

After reading Ezra’s thoughts and sleeping on mine from yesterday, I remain absolutely convinced that the administration’s unilateral pay freeze is horrible politics — but, even worse than that, it’s also terrible policy.