Convinced that even with the President’s approval rating holding at 29% and dropping, it would still be politically imprudent to call his ass on overreaching for political gain and the ability to intimidate the opposition through such objectively illegal methods as his massive domestic spying program on American nationals (lest the charge of “soft on terruh” be leveled), the Senate voted overwhelmingly to confirm the poster child of that program, General Michael Hayden, as CIA Director.

In some sense, that’s not unreasonable, as there seems little will to engage in what the Constitution’s drafters would have envisioned for a situation where the President has no compunction about thumbing his nose on Congress and trampling on individual citizen’s rights in direct contravention of the law… that would be called “Articles of Impeachment”. Yes, with a Republican majority in both Houses, it is inconceivable that a bill of indictment could even make its way out of the House Judiciary Committee, let alone pass a floor vote there… but it could be put on the Republicans… they could at least be made to kill it, and then have to defend that. A distant and pathetic second option might be to hold those directly responsible for the policy accountable, say, by giving them hell at confirmation. In this case, of course, we can’t expect that either.

Oh well. To be honest, General Hayden may be in a position to do less damage to our civil liberties at the higher profile, but actually less important all things be told, CIA, than he was at the highly secretive National Security Agency where, quite frankly, he had no accountability at all. In any event, he’s really just a symptom of a wider disease of executive lawlessness… while I have no brief for Congressman William Jefferson, an executive willing to breach 200 years of tradition and execute a search warrant in a Capitol Hill office of a member of the opposition party (and he conveniently of color at that), when it happens to be that same executive that believes it can unilaterally abrogate habeas corpus, spy on its own citizenry at will without oversight of any kind, issue signing statements purportedly justifying unilateral abrogation of any law it doesn’t like… let’s just say, it’s all of a piece… a troubling piece.

In the end, I have no doubt that the votes to kill Hayden’s nomination just weren’t there. But other than a few Dems running for President (Bayh and Feingold come to mind, as does Mrs. Clinton) and Arlen Spector of all people, there was, amazingly, just no will for a fight on this, and he sailed through 83 to 15. Despite disastrously bad presidential approval numbers, the Dems still manage to make it look like they stand for nothing… given votes like this… how can you really argue about that?

Again, in the great scheme of things, will Hayden be much worse, or frankly, much different, than Porter Goss, in management of the CIA? Probably not. But it was a free message… we just won’t stand for lawlessness… i.e., the President has a lot of cojones sending up his point-man in domestic eavesdropping and we’ll call his ass on it. But I stand corrected: rubber stamps to the Bush Administration are evidently “bipartisan”.