"Now we know what it takes to nudge Congress’s sense of self-respect into a state of at least semi-consciousness.
Senator Dianne Feinstein, God bless her, is throwing a very public fit over findings that the CIA spied on Congress — on her Select Senate Intelligence Committee, specifically — as part of a campaign to undermine the committee’s investigation into an interrogation program that the agency does not much want to see investigated.
It’s a strange contradiction: Senators do not want for self-respect. If anything, the individual members of that august collection of a hundred self-identified future presidents and vice presidents suffer from excessive self-regard at levels that are frequently embarrassing and occasionally delusional. Look into the eyes of John Kerry or Joe Biden and consider for a moment the political incubator that hatched such specimens of Miltonic-Luciferian self-importance. But the Senate, and Congress as a whole, have been experiencing something of a crisis of confidence in recent decades. Our constitutional order makes Congress the effective seat of domestic governance: Only Congress can appropriate funds; only Congress can tax. Spending bills must originate in the House, presidential appointments are subject to Senate approval. Only Congress can coin money. And while the Constitution entrusts the president with some important powers regarding such outward-directed issues as military engagements, only Congress can declare war or ratify a treaty.
In theory, only Congress can make a law. But Congress of late has eroded its own legislative monopoly. "...
..."If Senator Feinstein’s claims are in the main substantively correct, then the CIA has done serious violence to the law and to our constitutional order. And I suspect that she is largely on the money: CIA Director John Brennan has said that the facts will not support her allegations of “this tremendous sort of spying and monitoring and hacking,” the presence of the word “tremendous” in that sentence suggesting that what is really in dispute here is not the CIA’s actions but merely the scale of the CIA’s actions.
Congress has not been very interested in the abuses of the imperial executive when its victims were ordinary American citizens, or even Congress’s own constitutional turf. But now that the CIA is making the matter personal, we ordinary citizens might have some hope that Congress will be spurred into action by its members’ vanity, if not by their sense of duty."
BlazerBob wrote: But now that the CIA is making the matter personal, we ordinary citizens might have some hope that Congress will be spurred into action by its members’ vanity, if not by their sense of duty."
None of the above.
Congress is be spurred into action by its members who need to cover their arses.
But really will Congress do anything about any of it besides yell. These offenses have been going on for a very long time and so far they have not done anything substantial. Congress is totally ineffectual.
