Feingold gets his cake...

...but no one wants to eat it!

Call to Censure Bush Is Answered by a Mostly Empty Echo

WASHINGTON, MARCH 31 — The Senate Judiciary Committee opened a bitter if lopsided debate on Friday over whether Congress should censure President Bush for his domestic eavesdropping program.

Although few Senate Democrats have embraced the censure proposal and almost no one expects the Senate to adopt it, the notion that Democrats may seek to punish Mr. Bush has become a rallying cause to partisans on both sides of the political divide. Republicans called the hearing to give the proposal a full airing as their party sought to use the threat of Democratic punishment of the president to rally their conservative base.

Five Republicans at the hearing took turns attacking the idea as a reckless stunt that could embolden terrorists. Just two Democrats showed up to defend it, arguing that Congress needed to rein in the White House's expansive view of presidential power. The Democrats' star witness was John W. Dean, the former counsel to President Richard M. Nixon who divulged many of the details in the Watergate scandal.

Senator Russell D. Feingold, the Wisconsin Democrat who proposed the censure motion and is considering a 2008 presidential run, argued that the Bush administration's insistence that it needed no Congressional approval for its wiretapping program implied that "we no longer have a constitutional system consisting of three co-equal branches of government; we have a monarchy."

The NY Times still cannot describe the program honestly, they still refer to it as a "domestic eavesdropping program." No mention that its only on calls into or out of the US and that it is between suspected terrorists. A minor point, I know, but we are talking about the NY Times.