ChezLark

Oh, man; this is really depressing.

The Washington Post reports that the White House (not surprisingly) has been lobbying hard to prevent a proper Congressional investigation into the domestic spying program from getting underway:

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 [... ] Two committee Democrats said the panel [...] 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.

The article calls out Republican Senator Olympia J. Snowe from Maine, who was previously outspoken about investigating the spying program. What does she say now?

“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.
[...]
“The administration has obviously gotten the message that they need to be more forthcoming,” Snowe said.

So obviously, since Gonzales trekked up to the Capitol and explained that the President can do whatever he wants, no further inquiry is necessary.

But here’s what I find most troubling:

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.

Let me spell it out for all you kids out there:

• If what the President is doing is legal, then the law doesn’t need to be changed.
• If you need to change the law to authorize what the President is doing, that means the President is breaking the law right now.
• …So if you’re going around explaining that the way to “resolve” this “situation” is to pass legislation to authorize the President’s conduct, then I for one would like you to explain why we shouldn’t hold the President to account for breaking the freaking law, dammit!

So, why not hold the President to account? Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), who had previously signed a letter calling for an inquiry, explains it thusly:

“If some kind of inquiry would be beneficial to getting a resolution to this issue, then sure, we should look at it. But if the inquiry is just some kind of a punitive inquiry that really is not focused on finding a way out of this, then I’m not so sure that I would support that.”

Come to think of it, he has a point. Why on earth would we want to pursue a “punitive inquiry” in the face of strong evidence that the Executive is breaking the law?

((boggle))