Apparently another Republican stalwart has caught the Specter bug:
WASHINGTON, July 8 — In a sharply worded letter to President Bush in May, an important Congressional ally charged that the administration might have violated the law by failing to inform Congress of some secret intelligence programs and risked losing Republican support on national security matters.
The letter from Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, did not specify the intelligence activities that he believed had been hidden from Congress.
But Mr. Hoekstra, who was briefed on and supported the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance program and the Treasury Department’s tracking of international banking transactions, clearly was referring to programs that have not been publicly revealed….
Some folks have expressed surprise, I take a more jaded view. Let’s look at Bush’s approval spread in Michigan, as of June 2006 (SUSA): 32/66 approve/disapprove, compared with 37/61 overall. People don’t like George Bush in general and in a safely blue state like Michigan they really don’t like him.
For the Republicans this won’t be a pretty race by any measure. You have authortarian crap like Schiavo for which the proprietor of this blog is an excellent bellweather. The returning spectre of Social Security phase-out to energize pretty much everybody who uses or plans to use that program. Got medicare? Maybe you’re getting close to that “donut hole” where the government won’t offer a single penny for drugs for a couple of months. Lucky you. Pretty much everywhere the president has become a pure liability, even more so in blue states like Michigan. Hence the race is on to see who can punch their ‘independent’ card first. Timing matters here becuase whoever bails (or at least appears to bail) first will get the most benefit-of-the-doubt. Even Joe Lieberman, embarrassingly, wants to get in on the act.
So, Peter Hoekstra has discovered that Congress exists. No doubt any number of nervous incumbents will follow his lead. Just don’t hold your breath for anything to actually, you know, happen. Just like the script demands, big public displays like Hoekstra’s will last about as long as it takes to pack up the Klieg lights. If I wanted to coin a verb I would call it ‘spectering.’
***Update***
Emptywheel takes an informed look at the same question and comes up with a different answer – Hoekstra’s problem is that Bush wants to leave him out of the wackjobbery.
This is Hoekstra suggesting that he will play hardball with the Administration if he, Hoekstra, continues to lose power. It’s not so much that he minds Bush’s illegal spying programs (on the contrary, Hoekstra emphasizes his support for Bush’s illegal spying). But he knows he can use those programs to threaten Bush.
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