Fresh off of a brand new series of document releases, including several that flat out admit to the NSA violating the US Constitution with its surveillance schemes and collecting broad swathes of data about ordinary Americans’ communications, the White House is quick with another statement.

Caught red-handed in repeated lies about the NSA not doing any surveillance of the American people, White House spokesman Josh Earnest issued a new statement that was materially identical to the old one, insisting that “there is no spying on Americans.”

Which would be good news, except for all that spying on Americans that’s clearly been going on. Instead of copping to it, the administration seems to be hoping that no one will notice if they reiterate the lies.

It’s not working. Recent polls show that President Obama’s approval rating continues to decline significantly, and is falling fastest among young voters. That’s only natural when the truth about NSA surveillance is as ugly as it is.

But the big question is how long this can be sustained. More revelations of NSA violations keep coming, and even the schemes’ supporters see the Obama Administration’s position as totally untenable.

We still don’t know the full extent of the NSA’s abuse, and the more we learn the worse its going to get. The administration obviously won’t come clean on what’s still going on behind closed doors, but it is their refusal to come clean on what they already caught doing that is the most troubling aspect, one that dramatically underestimates the American public’s ability to get information that wasn’t in an official White House press release.