Censure motion is political stunt

Sen. Russ Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat who is supposedly a potential presidential candidate, found himself charging ahead with nobody behind him this week.

Feingold thinks President Bush should be formally scolded by the Senate for "unlawful authorization of wiretaps of Americans." But most Senate Democrats seemed to intuitively understand the political perils of Feingold's "censure" motion, so none really signed on to support him, and nobody was blocking his path either.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist exposed Feingold's pursuit as nothing more than a political stunt - by calling for an immediate vote in the Senate on the censure motion. That's when Feingold's Democratic colleagues vanished, knowing full well that they would be called on the carpet for a decisive position that might run counter to popular opinion.

And despite Feingold's conclusive resolution, the suggestion that President Bush has done anything "unlawful" is hardly a settled matter.

The question is whether his broad constitutional authority as commander-in-chief trumps the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, an antiquated law passed in the 1970s, before the combination of cell phones and the Internet and Islamic terrorists could even be imagined as a threat.

Ever since the law was passed - as well as before - presidents have used warrantless wiretaps for national security purposes, with the backing of attorneys general.

But in Bush's case, the practice has been framed as a "civil liberties" abuse, where Big Brother is supposedly trampling privacy rights from coast to coast. No one so far has made a case that the Bush administration has used the wiretaps for anything other than the stated purpose of eavesdropping on calls between U.S. phones and foreign countries to mine for information that could head off terrorist threats.

Polls show that most Americans aren't really offended. But still, Feingold and others in Congress have demanded that the president's national security responsibilities be handcuffed to the discretion and schedule of some judge who may or may not authorize a wiretap that the country's entire security apparatus may consider crucial.

Feingold and his friends are the same people, by the way, who would be the first to propose a "censure" motion against Bush for failing to detect and foil a terrorist attack if one were to happen.