The adjudicator would be a panel of the president’s most senior national security advisers, who would issue decisions in writing if at all possible. Those decisions would later be given to the Congressional intelligence committees for review. Crucially, the president would be able to overrule this court, and take whatever action he thought appropriate, but would have to explain himself afterward to Congress.

Such a court would embed accountability and expertise into the drone program. With a federal drone court, it would simply be too easy for a president or other executive-branch official to point his finger at a federal judge for the failure to act. With an internal court, it would be impossible to avoid blame.

It’s true that a court housed within the executive branch might sound nefarious in today’s “Homeland” culture — if Alexander Hamilton celebrated the executive, in Federalist No. 70, for its “decision, activity, secrecy and dispatch,” some now look at those same qualities with skepticism, if not fear.

In contrast, advocates of a drone court say it would bring independent, constitutional values of reasoned decision making to a process that is inherently murky.

But simply placing a drone court in the judicial branch is not a guaranteed check. The FISA Court’s record is instructive: between 1979 and 2011 it rejected only 11 out of more than 32,000 requests — making the odds of getting a request rejected, around 1 in 3,000, approximately the same as those of being struck by lightning in one’s lifetime. What reason does the FISA Court give us to think that judges are better than specialists at keeping executive power in check?

The written decisions of an internal national security court, in contrast, would be products of an adversarial system (unlike the FISA Court), and later reviewed by Congressional intelligence committees. If members of Congress saw troublesome trends developing, it could push legislation to constrain the executive. That is something a federal judge cannot do.

One of our Constitution’s greatest virtues is that it looks to judges as a source of reasoned, practical, rights-minded decision making. But judges should be left to what they know. A national security court inside the executive branch may not be a perfect solution, but it is a better way to balance the demands of secrecy and speed with those of liberty and justice.