There really is no surprise here that despite uncharacteristic flashes of independence by some Republicans, the White House has managed to once again roll the GOP. House and Senate Republicans abdicated their oversight responsibilities after getting pressure from the President with a 39% approval rating:
Representative Heather A. Wilson, the New Mexico Republican and committee member who called for the investigation last week, said the review "will have multiple avenues, because we want to completely understand the program and move forward."We have a President who broke the law. The White House has basically acknowledged that and thumbed their noses at Congress. And, why not? House and Senate GOPers have no independent thoughts. Rove programs them. They have no sense of their constitutional obligation to be a separate branch of government. That's reason enough for them to lose control of Congress.
But an aide to Representative Peter Hoekstra, the Michigan Republican who leads the committee, said the inquiry would be much more limited in scope, focusing on whether federal surveillance laws needed to be changed and not on the eavesdropping program itself.
At the same time, the Senate Intelligence Committee put off a vote on conducting its own investigation after the White House, reversing course, agreed to open discussions about changing federal surveillance law. Senate Democrats accused Republicans of bowing to White House pressure.
For weeks, the Bush administration has been strongly resisting calls from Democrats and some Republicans for a full review into the National Security Agency's surveillance program, saying that such inquiries were unnecessary and risked disclosing sensitive national security information that could help Al Qaeda.
