Wiretap hearings: now with 20% more dogs and ponies!

It's difficult to know just what to write about these hearings. For a start, there's the matter of Attorney General Gonzales not giving his testimony under oath. (Lying to Congress is a crime anyway, but the administration has a knack for doing this.) There was even a vote, and the Republicans on the committee decided against it. And Gonzales' carefully phrased non-answers would do Alito proud. Yes, evading questions is still considered acceptable testimony.

Maybe the low point was Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama trotting out the wife of a pilot killed during the 9/11 attacks. Just as Bush did during the SOTU speech, GOP strategists still think it's political gold to pimp victims. Congratulations.

The only good moments have been some pointed questions from Democrats and a Republican or two (hooray!). They don't get answers, but at least they're talking tough and hopefully setting up a scenario where the press accounts will not Gonzales' oily responses and contradictions.

During Gonzales' confirmation hearing last year, Feingold asked the would-be attorney general whether he believed that the president has the power "to authorize warrantless searches of Americans' homes and wiretaps of their conversations in violation of the criminal and foreign intelligence surveillance statutes of this country." Gonzales dismissed the question then as "hypothetical."

At today's hearing, Feingold focused on the first part of his question to argue that it wasn't hypothetical at all: At the time he testified last year, Gonzales knew that the president had, in fact, authorized "warrantless wiretaps" of Americans' telephone conversations. In defense, Gonzales focused on the second part of the question instead: Yes, the president had authorized "warrantless wiretaps," but he hadn't done anything "in violation of the criminal and foreign intelligence surveillance statutes of this country." So asking about the power to engage in such a violation, Gonzales said, was in fact a "hypothetical" question.

Gonzales may have dodged Feingold's bullet, but he wasn't -- and isn't -- done yet. Sen. Lindsey Graham followed Feingold, and the questions from the South Carolina Republican put the lie to the spin that only Democrats are worried about an imperial presidency.

Graham went after both prongs of the administration's defense of the warrantless spying program. First, he dismissed out of hand the notion that Congress somehow implicitly authorized warrantless spying when it adopted its use-of-force authorization after 9/11, and he cautioned Gonzales about making such a "dangerous" argument: If the White House reads the use-of-force authorization too broadly, Graham said, future Congresses will be wary when future presidents come looking for authority to use force against enemies.

Speaking of contradictions, it was asked of Gonzales why the admistration is so vociferous in stating that no strictly domestic calls are being monitored. Which begs the question of what exactly the point is with warrantless spying. After all, the 9/11 attackers were all in the US.