Coverage of Specter's Letter to Cheney Totally Inadequate

[davidbikman]

The Times (here) and WaPo (here and here) for the most part have been happy to treat the letter from the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee to the Vice President as yet another act in Washington's political theater, but characterizing it as a product of personal pique, or merely as evidence of a split within the GOP, obscures the Constitutional implications of the episode. Carl Hulse and Jim Rutenberg of the Times, for example, describe the letter as a "remarkable display of the strains within the party" and call Specter's motivation for releasing it "a deal made by Mr. Cheney with the other Republicans on the committee."

I disagree. In making the letter public, Arlen Specter is not some freshman congressman looking for a easy headline, and he's not focused primarily on Cheney's manipulation of his Committee; he's been a major player in the Senate long enough to not get offended by behind-the-back politicking. No, the letter's thesis statement is that

the Administration's continuing position on the NSA electronic surveillance program rejects the historical constitutional practice of judicial approval of warrants before wiretapping and denigrates the constitutional authority and responsibility of the Congress and specifically the Judiciary Committee to conduct oversight on constitutional issues.

And most coverage of the episode doesn't quote the really boffo passages: "There is no doubt that the NSA program violates the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act which sets forth the exclusive procedure for domestic wiretaps which requires the approval of the FISA Court" and that "this Administration... has failed to comply with the requirements of the National Security Act of 1947." A senior leader of the ruling party has publicly accused the executive branch of not only betraying its constitutional responsibilities, but of knowingly manipulating the political process in order to do so.

Those of us not living in caves, of course, have known this for quite awhile.

Also softpedaled are the letter's final, literally fantastic accusations (the papers also fail, excepting Dan Froomkin, to provide a link to the .pdf):

We press this issue in the context of repeated stances by the Administration on expansion of Article II power, frequently at the expense of Congress's Article I authority. There are the Presidential signing statements where the President seeks to cherry-pick which parts of the statute he will follow. There has been the refusal of the Department of Justice to provide the necessary clearances to permit its Office of Professional Responsibility to determine the propriety of the legal advice given by the Department of Justice on the electronic surveillance program. There is the recent Executive Branch search and seizure of Congressman Jefferson's office. There are recent and repeated assertions by the Department of Justice that it has the authority to criminally prosecute newspapers and reporters under highly questionable criminal statues.

Out of the whole letter, the one passage readers can reliably count on being excerpted is the bit about Specter passing Cheney twice on his way to the buffet table.

[Kagemusha]

1. They know that Specter is hot air and has no fist in his glove.

The media is results based not method or rhetoric based.