The most serious damage has been done to the legislative branch. The sharp decline of congressional power and autonomy in recent years has been almost as shocking as the efforts by the Executive Branch to attain a massive expansion of its power.

....There have now been two or three generations of congressmen who don't really know what an oversight hearing is. In the 70's and 80's, the oversight hearings in which my colleagues and I participated held the feet of the Executive Branch to the fire — no matter which party was in power. Yet oversight is almost unknown in the Congress today.

....Look for example at the Congressional role in "overseeing" this massive four year eavesdropping campaign that on its face seemed so clearly to violate the Bill of Rights. The President says he informed Congress, but what he really means is that he talked with the chairman and ranking member of the House and Senate intelligence committees and the top leaders of the House and Senate. This small group, in turn, claimed that they were not given the full facts, though at least one of the intelligence committee leaders handwrote a letter of concern to VP Cheney and placed a copy in his own safe.

Though I sympathize with the awkward position in which these men and women were placed, I cannot disagree with the Liberty Coalition when it says that Democrats as well as Republicans in the Congress must share the blame for not taking action to protest and seek to prevent what they consider a grossly unconstitutional program.

[Emphasis added -- Ed]

When I said something very similar to this a couple of weeks ago, I was castigated by the denizens of Daily Kos who read my diary, and called an idiot totally lacking in nuance, all for suggesting that Jay Rockefeller didn't deserve our plaudits, but instead should be criticised for placing the upholding of his position of power above the civil rights of the American people.

On the one hand, we applaud a powerless person like Rosa Parks for standing up for her rights, and encourage people to put their jobs on the line by revealing bad things that go on inside the government or big business, but we allow powerful people like Rockefeller to fall back on the "awkwardness" of their situations as an excuse for not doing anything when large scale violations of people's civil liberties are undertaken by this Administration. That's a double standard I can't approve of, and I'm glad that Gore took the opportunity to point it out.