The Carter Gilson Report

“Is this what you need to do your job, Mr. DNI?”
President Bush, quoted by CQ, referring to the question he will ask of Mike McConnell, Director of National Intelligence, about any FISA bill crossing his desk.

Congress has basically told Bush to stuff it, with negotiations breaking off and the Dems going their own way on reforms.

The White House offered up a “compromise” on its demands that FISA be altered to change the warrant process from judge issued warrants to an okay from the Attorney General. “Compromise” is in scare quotes for a reason.

But it attached several conditions that could be unacceptable to Democrats: that the review would only be after-the-fact and would only involve the administration’s general process of collecting the intelligence, not individual cases, said a senior administration official speaking on condition of anonymity to more freely discuss internal deliberations.

So, Trustworthy Alberto Gonzales would be deciding who is a target, and the FISA court would only get to rule on whether the stated rules for targeting are kosher.

The Administration seems to be hoping that if this proposed compromise gets passed and signed, that the Roberts/Alito Supreme Court will rule in its favor, despite its clear voilation of the Fourth Amendment.

FISA came about largely because the Church Committee found massive abuses of wiretaps in contravention of the Fourth Amendment. It sought to provide a legal framework for using that technology while still working within the established rights of the Constitution.

And now, thirty years later the Constitution itself is in peril because the people who are sworn to protect it are willfully ignorant of what it says and means.

Think Progress:

Mr. Chairman, when the airplane took off and the captain announced that we were heading to Baghdad, all you-know-what broke out on the airplane. The men started shouting, it wasn’t until the security guy working for First Kuwaiti waved an MP5 in the air that the men settled down. They realized that they had no other choice but to go to Baghdad. Let me spell it out clearly: I believe these men were kidnapped by First Kuwaiti to work at the US Embassy… I’ve read the State Department Inspector General’s report on the construction of the embassy. Mr. Chairman, it’s not worth the paper it’s printed on. This is a cover-up and I’m glad that I’ve had the opportunity to set the record straight.

That testimony is from Rory Mayberry, a subcontractor who was working for the firm building the US Embassy. I feel sick. Sick to my stomach. Sick at heart.

wapo:

The House voted yesterday to allow Vice President Cheney to keep his house, entertainment budget and sundry other entertainments, when a measure to withhold the money to pay for them failed.

The news on this, though, is not that it failed. No one, not even Rahm Emmanuel expected it to succeed. The news, burried way down in the article is that the vote was 217-209, which means that if only five Representatives had flipped to Yes, it would have passed.

That is as close to a no-confidence vote on the VP as we’ve gotten.

Fred Fielding, in response to the subpoenas of Harriet Miers and Sara Taylor related documents:

The doctrine of executive privilege exists, at least in part, to protect such communications from compelled disclosure to Congress, especially where, as here, the president’s interests in maintaining confidentiality far outweigh Congress’s interests in obtaining deliberative White House communications.

Actually, executive privilege is there in cases where disclosure would endanger things like national security, not where it would cause embarrassment or indicaate culpability. At any rate, Fred then went on to this lovely jab:

Further, it remains unclear precisely how and why your committees are unable to fulfill your legislative and oversight interests without the unfettered requests you have made in your subpoenas.

If that’s not a textbook obstruction, I don’t know what is. He’s asking why Congress can’t do oversight while wearing sunglasses in a dark room, as though the answer isn’t obvious.