The White House has agreed to let Senate Judiciary Committee leaders Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Arlen Specter (R-PA) “view the legal memos underpinning the administration’s warrantless surveillance program” so they can consider legislation that would give telecommunications companies immunity from privacy lawsuits.
Former Sen. Fred Thompson (R-TN) said he doesn’t share Dick Cheney’s views of executive power. “No, I think the constitution in times of war, especially, is very definitive about that,” he said. “[I]t’s divided power in the constitution. Our founding fathers divided that up. … So no one branch of the government can misuse power.”
According to new U.N. report on climate change, “the human population is now so large that the amount of resources needed to sustain it exceeds what is available at current consumption patterns.” The speed at which mankind has used the Earth’s resources over the past 20 years has risked “humanity’s very survival,” the study concluded.
“House Democratic leaders” are “privately surveying their members” to determine “support for a criminal contempt resolution against White House Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten and former White House Counsel Harriet Miers for shunning congressional subpoenas in the U.S. attorney investigation,” which could happen “as ealy as next week.”
International human rights groups have filed a lawsuit in France against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for allowing torture at detention centers in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay. The groups say that Rumsfeld should be detained when he visits France on Friday for authorizing human rights abuses.
During a tour of the California disaster area yesterday, President Bush couldn’t resist taking a shot at Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco, blaming her for Katrina. “It makes a significant difference when you have somebody in the statehouse willing to take the lead,” Bush said of California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
The House yesterday voted 265 to 142 to pass a revised SCHIP bill that sought to address concerns of conservative lawmakers. But two fewer Republicans voted for the new version. The vote tally “fell seven votes shy of the 272 needed for a veto-proof two-thirds majority.”
And finally: Bush’s Iraq policy is less popular than ghosts. “A poll released yesterday by the Associated Press made it official: Americans are more likely to believe in ghosts (34 percent) than to believe that President Bush is doing a good job with the war in Iraq (29 percent).”
What did we miss? Let us know in the comments section.
Previous in TP Politics
By clicking and submitting a comment I acknowledge the ThinkProgress Privacy Policy and agree to the ThinkProgress Terms of Use. I understand that my comments are also being governed by Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, or Hotmail’s Terms of Use and Privacy Policies as applicable, which can be found here.