Bush is just plain lying about having Congressional support for his criminal spying program:
Tom Daschle, then the Senate Democratic majority leader, says the Administration knows it did not have that implicit authority because White House officials had sought unsuccessfully to get congressional leaders to include explicit language approving no-warrant wiretaps in the resolution. Attorney General Gonzales says the Administration decided to go forward with the program anyway because it was convinced that the President possessed the inherent power to act.
The Administration likes to stress that congressional leaders were briefed about the new program from the start. But some of them object that they were told about it under ground rules that made it impossible for them to mount any opposition. Daschle tells TIME that he, House Speaker Dennis Hastert and Dick Gephardt, then House minority leader, were briefed in early 2002 by Cheney. There was a second briefing in 2004. "A couple of us expressed our concerns," Daschle says. "But the information we were given was more technical and less substantive. We were told we were being informed and not consulted." Within the intelligence community, officials knew that legal justifications for the spying were subject to challenge. At the NSA, says a former senior intelligence official, "there was apprehension, uncertainty in the minds of many about whether or not the President did have that constitutional or statutory authority."
