Republicans Getting Restless Over Wiretaps

Republicans Getting Restless Over Wiretaps

"The government of the United
States has been emphatically termed a government of laws, and not of men."
Marbury
vs. Madison

Rep. Heather Wilson “There will be no restrictions in statute for how the Army can assign women in the military.” – Rep. Wilson, the only female veteran in Congress and the woman who wants to run DoD.

The chronology
of Bush’s politicizing of intelligence goes something like this:
First, the president discloses classified information without any good reason
to do so. Why now? It’s not as if Los Angeles is hosting the Olympics
or under some new threat. (To understand how hurried and political this disclosure
was, consider the fact that Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a Democrat,
wasn’t briefed on the foiled plot and has been stiffed in his efforts
to meet with the president about homeland security in his city, a problem that
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and other Republican mayors do not have).
Then, by implying without stating that the NSA may have been involved, the White
House uses sensitivity about classified information as a shield against finding
out whether the NSA is relevant to the Los Angeles plot in the first place.

The Shoe
(Bomb) on the Other Foot

Propaganda has taken over the president's selling of his war on terror. It's
also subjecting important separation of powers people to
McCarthyism.

From the vice president on down, facts are being ignored, with ra-ra-ra, put
in its place in order to sell all the president's policies. But Republicans
are finally waking up to a restless reality. They are realizing that in their
negligence to genuflect to our fear-spreading leader, they have abdicated their
constitutional duty of oversight, with the country's and Congress' future hanging
in the balance. They have also ignored one of the most fundamental decisions
the Supreme Court ever rendered.

This is just going to piss off Paul Gigot, ruler of the Wall Street Journal
editorial page, who has been working overtime to save Terror Guy, as well as
get the FISA
court abolished. Let's see, how to put this…. Who gives a fig? When it
comes to Republicans, I'll put my money on Heather Wilson and Lindsay Graham
over the WSJ any day.

"I don't think that's sufficient," Senator
Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, said. "There is considerable concern
about the administration's just citing the president's inherent authority
or the authorization to go to war with Iraq as grounds for conducting this
program. It's a stretch."

<snip>

Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina,
who has also criticized the program, said Ms. Wilson's comments were "a
sign of a growing movement" by lawmakers to reassert the power of the
legislature.

"This is sort of
a Marbury
v. Madison moment between the executive and the legislative branch,"
Mr. Graham said in a reference to the 1803 Supreme Court decision in which
the court granted itself the power to declare laws unconstitutional.

"I think there's two things going on," said
Mr. Graham, a Judiciary Committee member. "There's an abandonment of
you-broke-the-law rhetoric by the Democrats and a more questioning attitude
about what the law should be by the Republicans. And that merges for a very
healthy debate."

Senator Chuck Hagel, Republican of Nebraska, said:
"I don't think anyone wants any kind of constitutional showdown over
this. We want the president to succeed, but the fact is we are a coequal branch
of government and we have serious oversight responsibilities."

<snip>

Yet Representative Jane Harman of California, the senior
Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, said Ms. Wilson expressed private
concerns to her about the eavesdropping last year, shortly after it became
public.

"She was very concerned," said Ms. Harman,
who has supported the program in the past but said she now believed that its
legal underpinnings were weak. "She came to me, asking me what I thought."

Ms. Wilson said she decided to speak out this
week because she had become increasingly "frustrated that the administration
was not giving us the information we needed to do our job." With
Mr. Gonzales unable or unwilling to answer questions at the Senate hearing,
she said, there was no way to determine whether the surveillance law needed
to be updated.

"I think the argument that somehow, in
passing the use-of-force resolution, that that was authorizing the president
and the administration free rein to do whatever they wanted to do, so long
as they tied it to the war on terror, was a bit of a stretch," she said.
"And I don't think that's what most members of Congress felt they were
doing."

Republican
Speaks Up, Leading Others to Challenge Wiretaps

(emphasis added)