Has this Congress no spine at all? Not even a small one?
Congress appeared ready to launch an investigation into the Bush administration's warrantless domestic surveillance program last week, but an all-out White House lobbying campaign has dramatically slowed the effort and may kill it, key Republican and Democratic sources said yesterday.
The Senate intelligence committee is scheduled to vote tomorrow on a Democratic-sponsored motion to start an inquiry into the recently revealed program in which the National Security Agency eavesdrops on an undisclosed number of phone calls and e-mails involving U.S. residents without obtaining warrants from a secret court. Two committee Democrats said the panel -- made up of eight Republicans and seven Democrats -- was clearly leaning in favor of the motion last week but now is closely divided and possibly inclined against it. They attributed the shift to last week's closed briefings given by top administration officials to the full House and Senate intelligence committees, and to private appeals to wavering GOP senators by officials, including Vice President Cheney. "It's been a full-court press," said a top Senate Republican aide who asked to speak only on background -- as did several others for this story -- because of the classified nature of the intelligence committees' work.
Lawmakers cite senators such as Olympia J. Snowe (R-Maine) to illustrate the administration's success in cooling congressional zeal for an investigation. On Dec. 20, she was among two Republicans and two Democrats who signed a letter expressing "our profound concern about recent revelations that the United States Government may have engaged in domestic electronic surveillance without appropriate legal authority." The letter urged the Senate's intelligence and judiciary committees to "jointly undertake an inquiry into the facts and law surrounding these allegations."
In an interview yesterday, Snowe said, "I'm not sure it's going to be essential or necessary" to conduct an inquiry "if we can address the legislative standpoint" that would provide oversight of the surveillance program. "We're learning a lot and we're going to learn more," she said....
No.
NO.
You do not provide legislative oversight for a PATENTLY ILLEGAL AND UNCONSTITUTIONAL PROGRAM. You kill it dead -- insofar as you can, in any event.
...Senate intelligence committee member Mike DeWine (R-Ohio) said in an interview that he supports the NSA program and would oppose a congressional investigation. He said he is drafting legislation that would "specifically authorize this program" by excluding it from the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which established a secret court to consider government requests for wiretap warrants in anti-terrorist investigations. The administration would be required to brief regularly a small, bipartisan panel drawn from the House and Senate intelligence committees, DeWine said, and the surveillance program would require congressional reauthorization after five years to remain in place. Snowe said she is inclined to support DeWine's plan. Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), who also signed the Dec. 20 letter seeking an inquiry, said yesterday that the FISA law should be amended to include the NSA program and to provide for congressional oversight....
So the administration's reward for defying Congress, flauting its authority, violating the rights of uncounted people ... is to make their ability to do so official. Wonderful.
The plain fact is, there was an oversight method in place, and the administration chose to disregard it for no particularly good reason. Putting another oversight method in place over, as mentioned, a patently illegal and unconstitutional program will simply give the administration something else to disregard. The administration asked for these powers, more than once. Congress said NO, more than once. And now, as their reward for ignoring Congress' refusal to authorize these methods, Congress will authorize these methods and pretend that if they're watching over things, it actually matters.
No. The administration does not simply need to be "more forthcoming". The administration needs to stop. The administration needs to respect Congress and its authority, and this they will never even pretend to do if Congress simply rolls over and plays dead every time the administration objects to an inquiry. The administration needs to respect the Constitution that it swore to uphold. The Constitution may not be a death pact, but if Congress acquiesces repeatedly in its violation, it's nothing more than an old piece of paper.
There's also this: whatever Congress choses to do from this point forward, at the time the wiretaps and other investigations were carried out, they were blatantly illegal. So do the damn investigation. We the People deserve to know exactly what the hell the administration did, how extensive it was, how many people were wrongly investigated without warrants. Maybe we'll discover that, hey, the administration actually acted in good faith and all those people should have been investigated ... although, given that there seems to have been a notable lack of arrests proceeding from those investigations, that conclusion would have to be doubted. More likely, we'll discover that this administration's paranoia has made them violate the rights of many people entirely without cause or any possible justification, and the reason they did these investigations without authority was because they knew that they could never be justified. (Another interesting fact: any information of actual wrongdoing discovered as a result of these illegal investigations can never be used in evidence against anyone investigated.)
Grow a goddamn spine, Congress. For once.
Posted by iain at February 15, 2006 01:14 PM
