Only a few years ago this same group saw Barr as a conservative hero for obtaining Clinton's impeachment in the House. Obviously, CPAC's praise for Barr did not derive from Barr's stand on conservative principle that a president must be held accountable if he violates the law. In Clinton's case, Barr's principles did not conflict with the blind emotions of the politically partisan conservatives demanding Clinton's impeachment.

In opposing Bush's illegal behavior, Barr is simply being consistent. But this time, Barr's principles are at odds with the emotions of the politically partisan CPAC audience. Rushing to the defense of Bush, the CPAC audience endorsed Viet Dinh's Fuhrer Principle over the rule of law.

Why do the media and the public allow partisan political hacks, like Viet Dinh, to define Bush's illegal actions as a national security issue? The purpose of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is to protect national security. FISA creates a secret court to which the president can apply for a warrant even after he has initiated spying. Complying with the law in no way handicaps spying for national security purposes. The only spying handicapped by the warrant requirement is spying for illegitimate purposes, such as spying on political opponents.

There are only two reasons for Bush to refuse to obey the law. One is that he is guilty of illegitimate spying for which no warrant would be issued by the FISA court. The other is that he is using "national security" to create unconstitutional powers for the executive.

Civil libertarian Harvey Silverglate writing in the Boston Phoenix says that Bush's grab for "sweeping, unchecked power in direct violation of a statute would open a Pandora's box of imperial possibilities." In short, it makes the president a dictator.

For years, the Republican Federalist Society has been agitating for concentrating more power in the executive. The members will say that they do not favor a dictator, just a check on the "imperial Congress" and "imperial judiciary." But they have not spelled out how the president can be higher than law and still be accountable, or, if he is only to be higher than some laws, but not other laws, and only in some circumstances, but not all circumstances, who draws the line through the law and defines the circumstances.

On Feb. 13, the American Bar Association passed a resolution belatedly asking President Bush to stop violating the law. "We cannot allow the U.S. Constitution and our rights to become a victim of terrorism," said bar association president Michael Grecco.

The siren call of "national security" is all the cover Bush needs to have the FISA law repealed, thus legally gaining the power to spy however he chooses, the protection of political opponents be damned. However, Bush and his Federalist Society Justice Department are not interested in having the law repealed. Their purpose has nothing to do with national security. The point on which the regime is insisting is that there are circumstances (undefined) in which the president does not have to obey laws. What those circumstances and laws are is for the regime to decide.

The Bush regime is asserting the Fuhrer Principle, and Americans are buying it, even as Bush declares that America is at war in order to bring democracy to the Middle East.

Dr. Roberts is John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute for Political Economy and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. He is a former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, former contributing editor for National Review, and a former assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury. He is the co-author of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.

Where could this power grab lead? President Bush and his surrogates have proclaimed many times that opposition to the Iraq war is dangerous, demoralizes the troops, encourages the enemy, and threatens America's chances for victory. If Bush believes that opposition to the war threatens national security, why doesn't he have the right to act against opponents to the Iraq war to protect national security?

Apparently government agents have already spied on a small Quaker peace group. Why then shouldn't Bush have the power to wiretap the phones of Iraq war opponents from Rep. Murtha to Cindy Sheehan? Why shouldn't he have the right to infiltrate anti-war groups with government informants? Why can't he place agent provocateurs in anti-war groups to incite violent demonstrations in order to discredit the anti-war movement which is harming national security? Why can't he burglarize the offices of psychiatrists of leading anti-war figures to find information with which to discredit them? Why can't he break into the offices of the Democratic National Committee?

Wait a second; the government has already done all of these things in the recent past. It was called Watergate and the COINTELPRO Program (which lasted from 1956-71. The founding document of COINTELPRO directed FBI agents to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize" groups and individuals that opposed U.S. government policy. The COINTELPRO program was investigated by a bi-partisan Senate Select Committee whose final report stated that the FBI "conducted a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association, on the theory that preventing the growth of dangerous groups and the propagation of dangerous ideas would protect the national security and deter violence." The Senate investigation led, among other things, to the passage of the FISA act which required a warrant from a special court in order for the government to place domestic wiretaps.

The Administration's rationale for warrantless wiretapping could justify the reinstatement of any or all of the illegal activities of the old COINTELPRO Program and the Watergate burglars. Even Nixon's lawyers never claimed a constitutional power for the President to act unilaterally in war time without regard to the Congress and the Courts (although Nixon once famously said, "If the President does it it's not illegal.") Bush provides the rationale to go even further. Since the President has the right to take all actions he thinks necessary to protect national security, why couldn't he censor newspapers that oppose the Iraq War? Why couldn't he arrest Iraq war opponents, and hold them without charges and without the right to a trial until he decides that the "War on Terror" is over? Taken to the extreme, why couldn't he torture Iraq war opponents based on his signing statement to the McCain anti-torture Amendment which states that the President can bypass this law if he believes doing so protects national security?

I'm not saying that these things will happen. I'm saying that Bush's theory of President's unilateral war time powers could justify such actions and more.

The Bush administration's legal theories are an invitation for denying Americans their basic democratic rights. The American people must be shown the danger. This should not be a Democratic vs. Republican issue nor a liberal vs. conservative issue. It should be an issue for all Americans who care about the survival of our republic. If Bush can't be stopped now from wiretapping Americans without a warrant, then this could be the beginning of the end of democracy in America as we know it. Hopefully Congress and the courts, with pressure from the American people, will overrule Bush's assertion of dictatorial power.

Near the end of the interview, Fox anchor Brit Hume brought up a controversy arising from the CIA-leak case, in which prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald said in court papers that former top Cheney aide Lewis Libby testified he had been authorized "by his superiors" to disclose information about the classified National Intelligence Estimate to members of the press. "Is it your view that a Vice President has the authority to declassify information?" Hume asked.

"There is an executive order to that effect," Cheney said.

"There is?"

"Yes."

"Have you done it?"

"Well, I've certainly advocated declassification and participated in declassification decisions. The executive order — "

"You ever done it unilaterally?"

"I don't want to get into that. There is an executive order that specifies who has classification authority, and obviously focuses first and foremost on the President, but also includes the Vice President."

Cheney was referring to Executive Order 13292, issued by President Bush on March 25, 2003, which dealt with the handling of classified material. That order was not an entirely new document but was, instead, an amendment to an earlier Executive Order, number 12958, issued by President Bill Clinton on April 17, 1995.

At the time, Bush's order received very little coverage in the press. What mention there was focused on the order's provisions making it easier for the government to keep classified documents under wraps. But as Cheney pointed out Wednesday, the Bush order also contained a number of provisions which significantly increased the vice president's power.

Throughout Executive Order 13292, there are changes to the original Clinton order which, in effect, give the vice president the power of the president in dealing with classified material. In the original Clinton executive order, for example, there appeared the following passage:

Classification Authority.
(a) The authority to classify information originally may be exercised only by:
(1) the President;
(2) agency heads and officials designated by the President in the Federal Register...

In the Bush order, that section was changed to this (emphasis added):

Classification Authority.
(a) The authority to classify information originally may be exercised only by:
(1) the President and, in the performance of executive duties, the Vice President;
(2) agency heads and officials designated by the President in the Federal Register...

In another part of the original Clinton order, there was a segment dealing with who was authorized to delegate the authority to classify material. In the Clinton order, the passage read:

(2) "Top Secret" original classification authority may be delegated only by the President or by an agency head or official designated...
(3) "Secret" or "Confidential" original classification authority may be delegated only by the President; an agency head or official designated...

In the Bush order, that segment was changed to read (emphasis added):

(2) "Top Secret" original classification authority may be delegated only by the President; in the performance of executive duties, the Vice President; or an agency head or official designated...
(3) "Secret" or "Confidential" original classification authority may be delegated only by the President; in the performance of executive duties, the Vice President; or an agency head or official designated...

Both executive orders contained extension sections defining the terms used in the order. One of those terms was "original classification authority," that is, who in the government has the power to classify documents. In the Clinton order, the definition read:

"Original classification authority" means an individual authorized in writing, either by the President, or by agency heads or other officials designated by the President...

In the Bush executive order, the definition was changed to read (emphasis added):

"Original classification authority" means an individual authorized in writing, either by the President, the Vice President in the performance of executive duties, or by agency heads or other officials designated by the President...

In the last several years, there has been much talk about the powerful role Dick Cheney plays in the Bush White House. Some of that talk has been based on anecdotal evidence, and some on entirely fanciful speculation. But Executive Order 13292 is real evidence of real power in the vice president's office. Since the beginning of the administration, Dick Cheney has favored measures allowing the executive branch to keep more things secret. And in March of 2003, the president gave him the authority to do it.

— Byron York, NR's White House correspondent, is the author of The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy: The Untold Story of How Democratic Operatives, Eccentric Billionaires, Liberal Activists, and Assorted Celebrities Tried to Bring Down a President — and Why They'll Try Even Harder Next Time.

Those bagpipes you hear playing in the background provide a much-needed funeral dirge for freedom, which died this week at the hands of the United States Congress.

Freedom has been on its deathbed for about five years now, mortally-wounded in the post-9/11 frenzy that put political expediency above the Constitution and gave paranoia supremacy over what used to be guarantees of individual rights for all Americans.

Freedom went on the endangered-species list in the hours following the 9/11 attacks when President George W. Bush turned to attorney general John Ashcroft and said "John, take whatever steps you feel are necessary to make sure something like this never, ever, happens again."

Turning a zealot like Ashcroft loose on the Constitution is like giving Bill Clinton the keys to a sorority house. Someone is going to get screwed big-time and in this case it was, collectively, the whole concept of freedom and individual rights in this country.

Ashcroft crafted his personal vision of a new America, one ruled by a police state reporting to a totalitarian government, and called it the USA Patriot Act. It sailed through a shell-shocked Congress like a fraternity on a panty raid and gave Bush and his gang of thugs all they needed to create a new American Gestapo, detaining this nation's citizens without due course, spying on Americans without warrants and setting the country on a headlong rush to ruin.

The abuses of the Patriot Act proved so onerous that even firebrand conservatives like Bob Barr joined forces with uber-liberals like the American Civil Liberties Union to fight it.

Late last year, spurred by anger over Bush's admission that he authorized the warrantless spying on Americans by the National Security Agency, the Patriot Act appeared to face serious opposition when it came up for renewal. Congress twice granted temporary extensions and promised to add new language to protect the civil liberties of Americans.

But, as happens all too often in Washington, those promises vanished into thin air as the Patriot Act this week cleared hurdle after hurdle and heads for permanent renewal when the goons who call themselves our elected representatives return from the President's Day recess.

In the end, the White House "negotiated" a set of meaningless changes with a handful of Republicans and the so-called compromise sailed through the Senate Thursday on a 96-3 vote. Even worse, the Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee successfully blocked attempts to open an inquiry in Bush's use of the National Security Agency to spy on Americans.

Not that the Democrats did that much to stop it. Even those who spoke out about Bush's spying on Americans said they supported the concept but only opposed how the President went about it. As long as he got warrants, they said, they didn't really care who the NSA snooped on. And a bunch of Democrats joined with Republicans Thursday to keep the rights-robbing USA Patriot Act the law of the land.

Which means virtually no one - Democratic or Republican, conservative or liberal, left or right - can claim the high road when it comes to destroying freedom in the United States. Only Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., seems to realize the dangers of the act, continuing to fight it and saying the law, even as amended, allows "government fishing expeditions" and an outright assault on the Constitution.

For the most part, the rest of Congress sold out the people who elected them to office, all Americans who depend on Congress to serve as a check and balance on the excesses of the White House and the Constitution of the United States.

Yes, freedom died this week and just about every one of the bitches and bastards who "serve" in Congress should take a long, hard look at the blood on their hands. They stand guilty of high crimes and treason against the United States of America. They are traitors and should be treated as such.


© Copyright 2006 by Capitol Hill Blue

That terrorist bomb plot against Los Angeles’ Library Tower turns out to be as bogus as a Hollywood movie plot that never made it past the storyboard.

David Ignatius in the Feb. 15 Washington Post: “Bush spoke about four al Qaeda plotters who had planned to use shoe bombs to blow open the cockpit door. But a foreign official with detailed knowledge of the intelligence scoffed at Bush’s account, saying that the information obtained from Khalid Sheik Mohammed and an Indonesian operative known as Hambali was not an operational plan so much as an aspiration to destroy the tallest building on the West Coast.

When I asked a former high-level U.S. intelligence official about Bush's comment, he agreed that Bush had overstated the intelligence.”

When were we going to see that corrective splattered on the front pages, the way Bush’s original story was earlier this month? Not in this universe—not with media willing to be stenographers to presidential deceptions first, truth seekers and investigators last.

That’s where the fetish of objectivity cuffs with the fraud of propaganda, a link the Bush administration nurtures and exploits to the point of glee: Bush’s contempt for the press is based on disrespect, the press being best of show disrespecting itself.

Newspapers would be justly criticized for running a damning story under a banner headline on the front page one day then retracting it with a minuscule correction on an inside page the next. There’s no way the effects of the original story could be reversed by the correction. Words alone don’t matter. Context, intent, calibration: those things matter.

That’s how the Bush administration has been successfully manipulating policy, public and wars for the last five years—by calibrating its manipulative Big Statements for maximum effect on the front page, knowing that when the truth comes out, if it does, the lie will have done its work.

The truth is relegated to corrections with shadowy admissions on inside pages months or years down the line.

Bush is less to blame in this if you assume that his administration will use whatever cynical, dishonest ploy it can to advance its agenda. This one does, consistently. The problem has mostly been the press playing along—doing exactly what it would be ashamed to do itself, when it errs and misleads, but on behalf of the administration.

There are obvious examples. The administration lied about the reliability of the evidence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, relying almost entirely on two Iraqi dissidents who’d been coached to say in in typically Sheheradesque Arabic exaggerations what was imaginatively translated into Starngelove briefings to titillate Bush’s ears and stand in as the “irrefutable documentation” of Saddam’s weapons program passed on to gullible senators and congressmen.

The administration lied on al-Qaida’s connections to Saddam. Big, bold lies based entirely on Mohammed Atta’s rumored trip to Prague, a trip that has been proved to be a fiction worthy of a Kafka subplot many times over. In either case few people asked questions until it was too late. When the deceptions were confirmed, the war was past its point of no return, for a good many thousand American soldiers and Iraqis too, of course.

The corrections ran as mea culpas on Op-Ed pages and cover-you-butt analyses on inside pages, though die-hard shootists like Dick Cheney and his night gallery at the Wall Street Journal editorial board still maintain that the al-Qaeda-Hussein connection was real, and probably have dreams about WMDs buried somewhere in the Iraqi desert.

Same story on the Medicare prescription drug plan: The administration lied about its cost when it claimed it wouldn’t go past $400 billion. A matter of days after Congress approved it, the press revealed that the cost would actually exceed $550 billion, and that the Medicare actuary in charge of putting the numbers together had his job threatened by the Bush administration when he, in turn, had threatened to reveal the true numbers (the question remains: why didn’t he do so before the congressional vote?).

Same story about the plot to bomb the Brooklyn Bridge, that nutty “revelation” John Ashcroft’s Justice Department had no qualms revealing early in the so-called war on terror. This, remember, is the story of the Ohio truck driver who plotted to take a blow torch to the Brooklyn Bridge’s steel cables. He realized long before he gathered up his wares that the idea was as harebrained as its execution (who couldn’t spot a blow torch anywhere on the Brooklyn Bridge, any time of day or night, just as any sixth grader could tell you that the redundancy of steel cables is one of the wonders of the bridge.) The guy ended up in prison anyway, because the administration needs something, anything, to show for its imaginary war.

Unless it was a subplot to “Independence Day,” the plot to bomb the Library Tower couldn’t stand up to scrutiny for very long. Not when even the kids in that class Bush read My Pet Goat to five years ago, now that they’re approaching middle school, are old enough to be asking the sort of 2+2 questions that would add up to 5 in their president’s reckoning.

But facts don’t dictate credibility. The man standing behind the seal of the president of the United States (or the pet goat) does. That was the lesson Bush learned early. The seal’s credibility is soaked in a couple of centuries of history. Plenty of capital there. He’s been splurging on it (the parallel with his splurge at the Treasury’s expense is irresistible), and the press has been letting him splurge, because it’s still an essentially trusting institution. It has to be.

You couldn’t entirely blame the media. We’re talking about the president of the United States, and the impulse to see a lie behind every presidential statement amounts to faithlessness in the very system the press, and we, depend on. Vietnam and Watergate were devastating enough. We neither have the courage nor the strength to face similar consequences yet again. We assume with every lie that it’s the last of them, or couch the lies as “overstatements,” “exaggerations,” “erring on the side of caution.” Bush smirks. The system’s integrity crumbles a little more. The reckoning becomes that much more dire, when it comes.

I used to think that talk of impeachment was so much extremism by the party out of power. But what do you do when lying has become so pathological in a presidential administration—lying on matters of state, of war, of trillion-dollar consequences, not on matters of sperm on dresses and idiotic blow jobs in stately antechambers—that even the press has adopted a method of enabling the lying?

The press and by extension the public are like the spouse of a drunkard just making do with the latest bout of rage and beating by rationalizing it until calm returns.

What do you do when the hemorrhaging credibility of the presidency may itself, worse than global warming, reach a tipping point? And what is that tipping point in a world where the United States has no one to hold it accountable but its own sense of survival?

Waiting for the next election almost three years down the line seems like the democratic option. But it’s increasingly looking like a craven surrender to the cynics, to those who’d claim that rocking the boat that much isn’t worth the price, or that the little dictator’s lies so far haven’t risen to such a level as to warrant what, in the United States, amounts to a coup—a deliberate, legal, magnificently institutional coup, that impeachment clause, but a coup nonetheless. Let’s see if the centrists, the moderates, the civility burghers will still be claiming in 2008 that it was just as well to wait him out.

Pierre Tristam is an editorial writer and columnist at the Daytona Beach, Fla., News-Journal, and editor of Candide's Notebooks. Reach him at ptristam@att.net.

The Justice Department failed to meet the time restraints under FOIA and failed to make a case that it was impractical to deal quickly with the request by the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

Justice Department spokesman Charles Miller said no determination has been made as to what the government's next step will be.

At a court hearing a week ago, Justice Department lawyer Rupa Bhattacharyya said the government would respond starting March 3, but she said she had no information on when the process might be completed.

Timing will depend on complexity, "and in this case there are a lot of complexities," Bhattacharyya said.

Kennedy wrote that "courts have the authority to impose concrete deadlines on agencies that delay the processing of requests meriting expedition."

Routine FOIA requests are to be handled within 20 days while expedited requests have no set time limit under the law, prompting the Justice Department to take the position that the amount of time for expedited requests could be longer than that for the routine 20-day handling.

"Congress could not have intended to create the absurd situation" enabling the government to unilaterally exceed the standard 20-day period, Kennedy wrote.


Copyright © 2006 The Associated Press.

The administration also played hardball with the Senate Judiciary Committee, rejecting a request by chairman Arlen Specter to have former attorney general John Ashcroft and his former deputy, James Comey, testify about the origins of the secret program, apparently because their testimony might reveal a deep division with the Justice Department about its legality.

The House Intelligence Committee, however, seems to be made of sterner stuff and is pressing ahead with an oversight investigation into the National Security Agency's eavesdropping on the overseas calls and e-mails of U.S. residents.

Congress keeps shying away from the underlying issue in the case _ whether the president can ignore the laws it passes because of the post-9/11 resolution authorizing the use of force and his war-fighting powers under the Constitution. And Congress also doesn't seem to have a great deal of appetite for insuring that Americans' fundamental civil liberties, especially the right to privacy, are respected.

There is an applicable law here, the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, that set up a special court to issue secret warrants for espionage and terrorism wiretaps. The Bush administration elected to skip the warrant process. The public may finally get a look at the administration's reasoning for that after a federal judge ordered the Justice Department to turn over its internal memos and legal opinions on the program. But that's thanks to a suit filed by civil liberties groups and not anything Congress did.

Congress is debating rewriting FISA both to streamline it and state explicitly that it does apply to NSA's eavesdropping. It is also debating exempting the NSA program from FISA altogether. But unless the lawmakers are willing to forcefully exercise their oversight function, and insist on the administration's compliance and disclosure, it won't much matter what Congress does.

(Contact Dale McFeatters at McFeattersD(at)SHNS.com)
© Copyright 2006 by Capitol Hill Blue

Mr. Roberts also said he did not believe that exempting the program from the purview of the court created by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act "would be met with much support" on Capitol Hill. Yet that is exactly the approach the Bush administration is pursuing.

"I think it should come before the FISA court, but I don't know how it works," Mr. Roberts said. "You don't want to have a situation where you have capability that doesn't work well with the FISA court, in terms of speed and agility and hot pursuit. So we have to solve that problem."

Mr. Roberts spoke in an interview a day after announcing that the White House, in a turnabout, had agreed to open discussions about changing surveillance law. By Friday, with Mr. Roberts apparently stung by accusations that he had caved to White House pressure not to investigate the eavesdropping without warrants, it appeared the talks could put the White House and Congress on a collision course.

White House officials favor a proposal offered by another Republican senator, Mike DeWine of Ohio, whose bill would exempt the eavesdropping from the intelligence court. Mr. DeWine wants small subcommittees to oversee the wiretapping, but Mr. Roberts said he would like the full House and Senate Intelligence Committees to have regular briefings.

"I think it's the function and the oversight responsibility of the committee," he said, adding, "That might sound strange coming from me."

Mr. Roberts's comments were surprising because he has been a staunch defender of the program and an ally of White House efforts to resist a full-scale Senate investigation. On Thursday, he pushed back a committee vote on a Democratic push to conduct an inquiry, saying he wanted to give the White House time to negotiate on possible legislation. On Friday, he dismissed accusations that he had bowed to pressure.

"The irony of this is that it is portrayed now as administration pressure brought to bear on us, meaning the Republicans on the committee and basically me," Mr. Roberts said Friday. "It's just the reverse. It's the Republicans on the committee, my staff and myself, who have been really — I don't want to say pressuring, but trying to come up with a reasonable compromise that will settle this issue. It was our activity that brought them along to this point, plus the possibility of an investigation."

The eavesdropping, authorized in secret by President Bush soon after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has allowed the National Security Agency to monitor the international telephone and e-mail communications of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people within the United States — without warrants — when the authorities suspect they have links to terrorists.

Democrats and a growing number of Republicans say the program appears to violate the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Some Republicans are also skeptical of the Bush administration's assertion that it has the inherent constitutional authority to conduct the eavesdropping, and that Congress authorized the program when it passed a resolution after Sept. 11 giving Mr. Bush authority to use military force to defend the nation.

In the House, Republicans on the Intelligence Committee have agreed to open an inquiry prompted by the surveillance program and are debating how broad it should be. Mr. Roberts said he had not spoken to Representative Peter Hoekstra, the Michigan Republican who is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, about what the House panel is doing.

Representative Heather A. Wilson, Republican of New Mexico and chairwoman of the House Intelligence subcommittee that oversees the National Security Agency, has pressed for a broad investigation, but Mr. Hoekstra's aides have said that any inquiry would be limited to an examination of the FISA law.

The Senate intelligence chairman, Mr. Roberts, said he believed the administration had the constitutional authority for the program, but added, "We would be much more in concert with the Congress and everybody else and the FISA court judges" if the court oversaw the program.

As panel chairman, Mr. Roberts holds great sway. An aide to the senator said he had some specific ideas that he had been privately discussing with committee members and other lawmakers. But neither the senator nor the aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the delicate nature of the negotiations, would make those ideas public.

Nor will Mr. Roberts have final say over what form legislation will take; rather, his ideas are circulating in an environment that one Congressional aide, referring to the Winter Olympic Games, said was "sort of like snowboardcross, with four proposals shooting out of the gate, jockeying for position."

Another senior Senate Republican, Arlen Specter, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has proposed legislation that would allow the FISA court to pass judgment on the program's constitutionality. And Senator Olympia J. Snowe, Republican of Maine and a member of the intelligence panel, said Friday that she believed the eavesdropping must come under the purview of the judiciary.

"I think we do have to have judicial review," she said, adding, "Whether it's the FISA approach or not I think remains in question, but it can't go on in perpetuity, and it can't be unfettered warrantless surveillance."

Whether Republicans can agree remains to be seen. "People are all over the place," Mr. DeWine said. "We don't have a consensus."

The White House has been in talks with Mr. DeWine, who said Harriet E. Miers, the White House counsel, called him on Wednesday night, on the eve of the Senate Intelligence panel's scheduled vote, to discuss his legislation.

"What we have talked about with some Congressional leaders is codifying into law what his authority already is," Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman said in an interview Friday, referring to the president. He added, "Senator DeWine has some good ideas, and we think they're reasonable ideas."

Since the program's inception, the White House has provided information about it to members of the "Gang of Eight," the Democratic and Republican leaders of the House and Senate, and the senior Democrat and Republican on the intelligence panels in both chambers. Last week, the Bush administration went further, revealing details of the program to all members of the House and Senate intelligence panels.

Mr. DeWine said his proposal called for an intelligence subcommittee with "professional staff" to have oversight. "It would be fundamentally different than doing it by the Gang of Eight, where there's really no staff," he said, adding, "The key is oversight."

His comments came in response to a USA Today article yesterday reporting that companies employing lobbyist Michael Herson - the husband of a senior Specter aide - had been the recipients of $48.9 million in funding "earmarked" by Specter.

Specter used earmarking 13 times in the last three years to allocate funds to clients of Herson's firm, American Defense International, the newspaper reported.

Herson is the husband of Vicki Siegel Herson, Specter's legislative assistant for appropriations. USA Today reported that she handles Specter's work on the Senate Appropriations Committee and its defense subcommittee, where the earmarks in question originated.

Herson's lobbying firm has collected $1.8 million in fees from the clients since 2002, the paper reported. In a statement, Specter said that Herson never lobbied him or his office and that others from the companies and institutions - including Drexel University - had asked for the money.

"If you take a look at the facts, there is no violation of either law or ethics," the statement said.

Siegel Herson's role, if any, in the earmarking remains unclear.

Siegel Herson, who uses just Siegel professionally, has declined to talk to reporters. Specter said he spoke with her yesterday but had been unable to determine precisely her involvement in the allocations that went to her husband's clients.

"I'm going to check it out further," he said yesterday.

He added, "There's no indication from anything I know that this occurred."

Specter said that Siegel Herson never disclosed to him that her husband was working for the recipients of his earmarks - nor did she suggest to him that she should recuse herself from any earmark decisions involving clients of her husband's.

Specter said he did not know whether Herson had spoken to his wife about his clients that received the funding.

Citing her child-care obligations, Specter said, as of six months ago Siegel Herson had stopped doing appropriations and was working only one day per week.

Specter said she told him that he might have been in the same room with Herson three times, all in large gatherings. The senator said he would be unable to recognize Herson.

The largest of the earmarks went to Drexel - a total of $17.5 million in the last two fiscal years - for an initiative to link the military's computer systems.

Other firms receiving significant earmarked appropriations were Power+Energy Corp. of Ivyland, Bucks County; 3e Technologies International of Maryland; Gestalt L.L.C. of Camden; Gentex Corp. of Carbondale, Pa.; and California-based Universal Space Network Inc.

Specter reviewed the lists and said he had met only "infrequently" with officials of Drexel among all the firms on the list.

All of the earmarks paid for defense-related purchases of research, software and oxygen masks.

In each case, the senator's office said, someone other than Herson sought the earmarking. He released a statement naming the lobbyists and others who asked for the money.

In a December news release announcing $56 million worth of earmarks, including $17 million for these firms, Specter said: "These projects, key to our nation's defense, will be invaluable in our continuing war on terror."

Earmarks have been controversial because the directed spending is rarely challenged. Defense earmarks played a role in the recent bribery conviction of former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R., Calif.).

"Earmarks usually are slipped into appropriation bills without a vote, without debate and without notice," said Roberta Baskin, executive director of the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit watchdog group that monitors lobbying. "That's why a seat on the Appropriations Committee is so coveted."

"If these projects had been debated on the floor," Baskin said, "there's a good chance someone would have checked the sponsor of the projects and checked who would benefit from it. But that's not how the earmarking process works. It's all done in secrecy."

Specter argued that he had "long-standing concern" about earmarks.

"In my capacity as chairman of the appropriations subcommittee for labor, health and human services, and education, last year I eliminated all earmarks, which amounted to $1 billion."

The senator added that he took that step because there were insufficient funds in the budget, not because he objects to earmarks, which he said produced jobs in Pennsylvania.

Evolution of Earmarking

The dictionary definition of an earmark refers to identification marks on livestock, and in politics the important animal is the "steer."

Earmarks in politics are legislative provisions that target, or steer, benefits to a particular company, organization or locality. Thousands of such projects are threaded into the annual spending or appropriations bills.

For example, House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R., Ill.) earmarked $200,000 to Paw Paw, Ill., in a fiscal 2005 spending bill to replace the town's 100-year-old water- storage tower.

Earmarks have grown exponentially in the last decade, from 1,439 in 1995 to 13,997 last year, according to Citizens Against Government Waste.

A key criticism of earmarks is that they are usually inserted into appropriations bills without a vote and can be hidden in a larger bill. The earmark, unlike the tag on a steer's ear, then becomes invisible and can pass without debate.

It always happens. We publish a column by someone who expresses a point-of-view that runs counter to someone else's political leanings and the emails flow over the electronic transom like diarrhea: Most of them saying something like "boy, if (insert name of politician here) were President or (insert name of political party here) were running Congress this wouldn't have happened."

That's the way life is for partisans. They just can't think outside the political box.

As soon as someone starts a conversation with "I'm a Republican" or "I'm a Democrat," I usually stop listening. If they say "I'm an American," then my ears stay open. Trying to reason with partisans is a waste of time. They, as a rule, see things from a limited perspective and that perspective is seldom their own. It is a party-fed line of bullshit tailored by a political hack in Washington whose only goal is further the agenda of an organization whose selfish interests only undermine the American system of government.

Democrats blame Republicans for the mess we're in these days. Republicans blame Democrats. In fact, both sides share the blame and neither side presents any real solutions because they can't get beyond their own partisan agendas that are more about control than what's good for the country.

Republicans are corrupt. So are Democrats. Republicans abuse power. So do Democrats. Republicans put their own narrow-focus, special-interest fed agenda ahead of the welfare of America. Got a newsflash for you. So do Democrats.

It is not one party or another that is destroying America. It's the political system itself - a self-perpetuating monster that feeds on money, lust for power and self-interest. Republicans tolerate a crook like Tom DeLay in their midst. Democrats have Corrine Brown. Republicans had Duke Cunningham. Democrats had Jim Trafficant. Both parties have their crooks, their cheats, their swindlers and their con-artists. And both parties try and protect them.

George W. Bush uses the power of the White House to go after his enemies. So did Bill Clinton. Abuse of power by a President, Democrat or Republican, is nothing new.

Democrats and Republicans voted to authorize the war in Iraq. Democrats now say they were misled by Bush. They were. We expect our elected officials to ask the hard questions before voting to send young American men and women to die in a war based on lies but the sad truth is few on Capitol Hill - Republican or Democrat - raised a serious objection before giving Bush permission to wage war.

Both Democrats and Republicans voted for the right-robbing USA Patriot Act, a single piece of legislation that gutted the Constitution and destroyed the American way of life. And Democrats stood alongside Republicans in the Senate this week and voted to reauthorize that act.

On Meet the Press last week, Jane Harman, the ranking Democratic member of the House Intelligence Committee, said she and other Democrats supported using the National Security Agency to spy on Americans but did not like the fact that the President didn't fully brief Congress about it.

"I support the program," she said. "I've never flinched from that."

In other words, she and her fellow Democrats are not upset that the United States government is using all its technology to eavesdrop on Americans. They're just mad that she wasn't in the loop.

What all this tells me is that neither party gives a damn about the Constitution or the freedoms that used to define this country.

It tells me that both have sold out their country in the name of politics.

It tells me Republicans and Democrats have one thing in common: They are all traitors to the United States of America.

"There are causes worth fighting for even if you know that you will lose," Dreyfuss said during a speech at the National Press Club. "Unless you are willing to accept torture as part of a normal American political lexicon, unless you are willing to accept that leaving the Geneva Convention is fine and dandy, if you accept the expansion of wiretapping as business as usual, the only way to express this now is to embrace the difficult and perhaps embarrassing process of impeachment."

Noting that the process was established by the country's "founders, who we revere to check executive abuse with congressional balance," Dreyfuss said impeachment "is a statement that we refuse to endorse bad behavior."

"If we refuse to debate the appropriateness of the process of impeachment, we endorse that behavior, and we approve the enlargement of executive power," regardless of whoever may occupy the White House in the future, he said.

"And don't kid yourselves: No one ever gives up power, ever," Dreyfuss added.

"Now, it is not your job as the press to impeach George Bush," the actor stated. However, people in the media should "maintain the integrity of that debate" by not dismissing the topic out of hand as partisan or unpatriotic.

During his address on the subject of Hollywood's view of contemporary news media, Dreyfuss said he is not a cynic or a liberal, but is instead a "'libo-conservo-middle-of-the-roado,' and I have been for many years."

"I'm deeply in love with my country," he added. "As a matter of fact, I'm deeply in love with the country that I was taught about in school, the land of the free and the home of the brave."

Nevertheless, Dreyfuss charged that "people can sometimes be pretty thoughtless, pretty terrified and do some pretty impressive damage" when they are wrong or "are the victims of political hypnosis."

In the past, "time and distance played an amazing part in keeping the human race from killing itself," the actor noted. The need for revenge after an attack "inevitably weakened because it took a lot of time to get men into ships and move them to the right battlefield. Only those truly staunch of heart and truly zealous could keep up that hatred.

"But now, people in Kansas see the [Twin] Towers fall at the exact instant as people in Nigeria or Cairo," he said. "Instantaneous knowledge leads to instantaneous reaction, which creates a demand for an instantaneous, reflexive response."

Dreyfuss blamed part of that reaction on television newscasters, who "fill the air with the same terrible clips, the same blaring intro music, the same screaming fonts, and then the same clips again and the same screaming fonts again and again to fill up these news cycles."

"Television did this. Television created the sound bite and then shrunk it," the actor said. "Television replaced words with images so that people make extraordinary decisions based not on prose or any attempt at analysis," but on pictures instead. See Video

The actor saved his harshest tone for those who accuse critics of the government and its officials of having a more serious motive.

"Watch me lose my sense of humor if people accuse me of treason," Dreyfuss said before mocking two of the Fox News Channel's most popular hosts. "'That's not very O'Reilly of you, Mister Smarty-Pants,' or 'What would Sean Hannity have to say about that, Mister Too-Complex-for-Your-Own-Good?'" See Video

However, "none of this happened because of any conspiracy," he stated. "This happened because we have not paid attention to the new rules of the electronic media."

To restore true American values, the actor called for children to be taught "the tools of debate and dissent," as well as a return to the principle of civility, which he called "the oxygen that democracies require else they become poisoned and die, as this democracy will."