White House attempting to fix NSA surveillance hearings

There is only one way to interpret this bombshell from the Washington Times' Insight Magazine: the White House is engaged in jury tampering with regards to the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on Bush's illegal wiretapping.

Congressional sources said Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove has threatened to blacklist any Republican who votes against the president. The sources said the blacklist would mean a halt in any White House political or financial support of senators running for re-election in November.

"It's hardball all the way," a senior GOP congressional aide said.

The sources said the administration has been alarmed over the damage that could result from the Senate hearings, which began on Monday, Feb. 6. They said the defection of even a handful of Republican committee members could result in a determination that the president violated the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Such a determination could lead to impeachment proceedings.

This is not, as Bush apologists will insist, politics as usual. This is obstruction of justice. It is a crime against democracy.

Karl Rove is attempting to circumvent (yes, there is that word again) the investigative process. This senior official of the White House is threatening United States senators to achieve a pre-determined outcome on behalf of the president. It is exactly the same as if gangsters threatened the lives of jurors in the trial of a mob boss.

It remains only to to be seen how susceptible these senators are to such naked thuggery. Will they discharge their duties faithfully to the American people, or will they complete the process of subordinating the legislative branch of government to the executive? After all, if a president who admits to violating the law cannot be judged by lawmakers to have violated the law, then our system of checks and balances is dead. If, under threat of political retaliation, these senators fail to call a crime a crime, then we need not wait for Justice Alito to ratify the theory of the unitary executive. It will have been established for all intents and purposes.

The romantic in me wants desperately to believe that these Republican senators will remember their duty to the republic and tell Karl Rove and George W. Bush to go to hell; that they will reject Rove's coersion and judge the president's actions by one standard only: the law.

After watching Monday's proceedings, however, and listening to those senators twisting their consciences into knots to excuse Bush's actions, the cynic in me says to the romantic, "you fool."