"Opposition Party" In Name Only

Greg at The Talent Show says:

Yesterday on CNN, Ed Henry gave the following update on the Feingold censure resolution :

What just happened a few minutes ago is that Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, the reason why there was an objection, is Frist declared he wants to bring this up for an immediate vote tonight, so it will not be a free pass. He wants to get Democrats on record here, make them decide whether they want to take what could be seen as an extreme stand and vote for a censure of President Bush.

Frist is gambling that in fact this will go down something like 85-to-15 or 90-10 because a lot of Democrats are probably saying they will not support this.

Assuming only ten Democrats end up supporting the censure resolution, where does that leave us? Well, take a look at these internals from the latest CBS poll (via Atrios)



If only 10 of 44 Democrats are willing to stand against the President, that gives Bush a greater approval rating among Democratic Senators (77%) than among his own base (74%). Cowards.

Cowards, indeed. Gregg Greenwald weighs in too...

It should go without saying that they [Democratic Senators] have all the facts they need to conclude definitively that the President broke the law. Bush himself admits that he ordered eavesdropping on Americans without the judicial oversight and approval required by the law the Congress passed in 1978. There are no factual disputes about that. Even the Administration doesn't deny any of the facts necessary to establish that they broke the law.

A factual investigation into the NSA program would certainly be nice -- in order, for instance, to find out if there are other illegal eavesdropping progams which we do not yet know about, and/or to find out how the eavesdropping power was used (something we don't know because the eavesdropping was done in secret, exactly what the law criminalizes). But no investigation is necessary to conclude that the law was broken because the law makes it a criminal offense to eavesdrop on Americans without judicial approval and that - by the Administration's own (proud) admission - is exactly what they did.

And beyond all of that, there isn't going to be an investigation, so it borders on the surreal for these Senators to say that they want to wait until the investigation is complete. The reason there isn't going to be an investigation is because the President's allies voted against it. That just happened last week, and yet Democratic Senators literally seem either not to have heard about that event or to have forgotten that it happened, because they keep saying that they want to wait for the investigation to be complete -- the same investigation that is not going to occur. [emphasis mine -bill]