[gv data=”https://floppingaces.net/gopad.flv”][/gv]
I guess a missed a real doozy of a hearing today with good ole’ Russ Feingold:
John W. Dean, Richard Nixon’s White House lawyer, told senators Friday that President Bush’s domestic spying exceeds the wrongdoing that toppled his former boss.
Bush, Dean told the Senate Judiciary Committee, should be censured and possibly impeached.
“Had the Senate or House, or both, censured or somehow warned Richard Nixon, the tragedy of Watergate might have been prevented,” Dean said. “Hopefully the Senate will not sit by while even more serious abuses unfold before it.”
It doesn’t get any better then this folks. A convicted felon is called by Feingold to tell the world that Bush has been a bad boy and needs to be punished.
Simply amazing…it seems some of the Democrats agree:
The censure resolution has attracted only two co-sponsors, Democratic Sens. Tom Harkin of Iowa and Barbara Boxer of California. The Senate’s other 41 Democrats have distanced themselves, many saying they want to first see the results of a Senate Intelligence Committee investigation of the matter.
Privately, Democrats in the House and Senate have said that embracing a censure resolution before the facts are known would damage their credibility this election year.
Well, I wouldn’t say they agree, more like they recognize Feingold is a fruitcake and they covet power, something going along with this censure would deny them.
Feingold is basically saying that spying on our enemies is like what Nixon did. It’s a crime. He wants to put handcuffs on the executive branch of our government because a Republican is in office, damn the consequences. Public safety? Who cares, it’s a law enforcement issue dontcha know!
The felon further said:
?we no longer have a constitutional system consisting of three co-equal branches of government, we have a monarchy.?
This right there tells you everything you need to know about this guy. He has the DummiesU hook in his gums and they are reeling him in big time.
Bush saw that the FISA court judges would not allow evidence gained from these wiretaps, wiretaps that were legal under his Constitutional authority, to be used to justify a warrant in the 72 hr timeframe:
So early in 2002, the wary court and government lawyers developed a compromise. Any case in which the government listened to someone?s calls without a warrant, and later developed information to seek a FISA warrant for that same suspect, was to be carefully ?tagged? as having involved some NSA information. Generally, there were fewer than 10 cases each year, the sources said.
According to government officials familiar with the program, the presiding FISA judges insisted that information obtained through NSA surveillance not form the basis for obtaining a warrant and that, instead, independently gathered information provide the justification for FISA monitoring in such cases. They also insisted that these cases be presented only to the presiding judge.
So instead he continued using his authority to listen in on Al-Qaeda, with reviews of the program every 45 days. Plus his Administration briefed the head honcho’s in both houses about the program routinely.
This will go NOWHERE but downhill for the Democrats so I say, bring it on! More Feingold, more Dean, more Boxer….nothing makes me smile more then seeing these fools on TV spouting their insanity.
I mean didn’t they just release a statement on how they are gonna get tough on terrorism by finding Bin Laden, because we all know that once Bin Laden is gone then there will not be any more terrorism.
So this is their first step in getting tough? By taking it to the man who say’s he will listen to our enemies as they call into the US.
I love it.
And then they go off on one of the only Democrats with some common sense, Joe Lieberman:
Sen. Joe Lieberman?s strong stand on national security has so rankled some fellow Democrats that they actually booed him at a political dinner on Thursday night.
[…]But scattered boos greeted Lieberman when he took the podium, and “he had to stop three times during his remarks to shush the crowd so he could deliver key points,? the Stamford Advocate reported.
Lieberman is also under fire from the left-wing blog Daily Kos, which is helping Lamont raise money for his campaign.
In a posting headlined “Sen. Lieberman: big whiner,? Kos quotes a press release from the Lieberman campaign regarding Lamont?s tactics:
“Attacking Senator Lieberman?s character and integrity was a predictable but dishonorable way to begin this campaign. Mr. Lamont is clearly going to run a very negative and angry campaign where the truth doesn?t get in the way.?
Just who they need running the show, KOS.
I love it even more.
I will end with Andy McCarthy’s excellent question…shall we censure Congress:
?[N]othing? in federal statutory law
shall limit the constitutional power of the President to take such measures as he deems necessary to protect the Nation against actual or potential attack or other hostile acts of a foreign power, to obtain foreign intelligence information deemed essential to the security of the United States, or to protect national security information against foreign intelligence activities. Nor shall anything ? be deemed to limit the constitutional power of the President to take such measures as he deems necessary to protect the United States against the overthrow of the Government by force or other unlawful means, or against any other clear and present danger to the structure or existence of the Government.
Was it ?King George? Bush (ludicrously referred to as a ?monarch? by Sen. Russ Feingold today)? Vice President Cheney? Or maybe Karl Rove? Fox News? Rush Limbaugh? National Review?
Well, no. It was none of those. Instead, the foregoing forceful assertion of robust executive power to do whatever in the President?s judgment was necessary to protect the Nation against foreign threats, including to conduct electronic surveillance inside the United States, was made by ? the United States Congress.
It is from Section 2511(3) of Title 18, United States Code ? a provision enacted in 1968 in conjunction with the first federal wiretapping law. Its purpose was to make plain what had been universally understood since constitutional governance began in 1789: it would be unconstitutional for Congress to enact a law that purported to seize control of, or reduce, the constitutional authority of the President to collect intelligence in order to protect the American people from hostile foreigners.
The Congress, with the complicity of President Jimmy Carter, blatantly violated its own statute when it enacted FISA in 1978 and undertook to seize what a decade before it said could not be seized.
So embarrassingly obvious was the transgression that Congress felt compelled to bleach it out by repealing Section 2511(3) and pretending the whole thing never happened. (Unlike the President, when Congress violates the law, it can make that law disappear.)
It was an imperious maneuver by the 1978 Congress, ignoring checks and balances and declaring that Congress, not the Constitution, was our ultimate ruler. It was downright oligarchical.
So should we censure Congress?
Maybe Sen. Feingold, staunch libertarian that he purports to be, should read the Federalist Papers. He might start with No. 72, in which Hamilton warned, for the sake of liberty, that Americans remain on guard against ?[t]he propensity of the legislative department to intrude upon the rights, and to absorb the powers, of the other departments[.]?
Indeed.

See author page