Let’s look at the facts.

Under the reign of Alberto Gonzales, we’ve seen an authorization of torture and the approval of 4th-Amendment defying wiretapping.

We’ve heard a claim that habeus corpus rights don’t exist, in spite of their black-and-white guarantee in the Constitution. And we’ve heard an assertion that executive rights that have no basis in the print of that document can in fact be found, implied, nebulously, in between the lines written by the founding fathers.

And the Democrats are going after him for firing eight political appointees … for political reasons?!? An abuse of discretion amid wanton abuses of power.

Listen, I’m as disturbed as the next guy that the administration has perverted the role of U.S. Attorney offices, making them just another Rovian fiefdom. But should this scandal — an esoteric wonkfest, at best — really have emerged as the Democrats’ top investigative priority?

I think it’s telling to look at the stakes in this battle. Who were the victims, aside from the fired attorneys? The most controversial firings are those of USAs who either were too agressive in investigating Republican scandals (see: Duke Cunningham) or not responsive to Bush administration desires to see Democrats prosecuted (see: New Mexico.)

That is to say that this is not only a scandal about the politicization of political apointees, but over those appointees’ work vis a vis politicians.

Fundamentally, this has gotten Democratic politicians’ attention — because it affects Democratic politicians.

Through their obsessive focus on this minor scandal, Democrats appear to be a party most committed to protecting their own — instead of emerging as a principled party concerned about protecting the 4th Amendment, Habeus Corpus, or humane-treatment rights of all Americans.

And that’s a goddamn shame.

It’s hardly just begun, but let’s review for a second the rather stunning impact of the Democratic congressional takeover. Not all of these advances have been won through legislation, but it’s safe to say none of them would have happened without the ballance provided by a Democratic House and Senate.

• Rumsfeld’s gone.
• Bush has backtracked on his warantless domestic spying, placing the extra-legal NSA program under the watchful eye of the FISA courts.
• You can now apply to be removed from the government’s No-Fly list.
• Chuck Hagel is openly clashing with Condi Rice on the war, in Senate hearings demanded by Democrats.
• Legislation to address the climate crisis is on the docket.
• The House has increased the Minimum Wage, decreased costs of Rx drugs bought by the government, sliced the interest on student loans, beefed up air-cargo security, implemented new ethics rules, and is about to revoke corporate welfare to the oil companies.

Not bad for three months after election day.

What else am I overlooking?

As divined by George Will in his column No Checks, Many Imbalances:

“Whenever the nation is at war, the other two branches of government have a radically diminished pertinence to governance, and the president determines what that pertinence shall be. This monarchical doctrine emerges from the administration’s stance that warrantless surveillance by the National Security Agency targeting American citizens on American soil is a legal exercise of the president’s inherent powers as commander in chief, even though it violates the clear language of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which was written to regulate wartime surveillance.”

“No one is against wiretapping suspected terrorists. The question is how to bring this program within the law.” — 2008 contender Sen Joe Biden (D-Delaware) responding to the ruling that Bush’s warrantless NSA wiretaps are unconstitutional.

The wiretapping program here in litigation has undisputedly been continued for at least five years, it has undisputedly been implemented without regard to FISA and of course the more stringent standards of Title III, and obviously in violation of the Fourth Amendment.

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The President of the United States, a creature of the same Constitution which gave us these Amendments, has undisputedly violated the Fourth in failing to procure judicial orders as required by FISA, and accordingly has violated the First Amendment Rights of these Plaintiffs as well.

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In this case, the President has acted, undisputedly, as FISA forbids. FISA is the expressed statutory policy of our Congress. The presidential power, therefore, was exercised at its lowest ebb and cannot be sustained.

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As Justice Warren wrote in U.S. v. Robel, 389 U.S. 258 (1967):

Implicit in the term ‘national defense’ is the notion of defending those values and ideas which set this Nation apart. . . . It would indeed be ironic if, in the name of national defense, we would sanction the subversion of . . . those liberties . . . which makes the defense of the Nation worthwhile.

From the decision of District Judge Hon. Anna Diggs Taylor:

The Presidential Oath of Office is set forth in the Constitution and requires him to swear or affirm that he “will, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

The Government appears to argue here that, pursuant to the penumbra of Constitutional language in Article II, and particularly because the President is designated Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy, he has been granted the inherent power to violate not only the laws of the Congress but the First and Fourth Amendments of the Constitution, itself.

We must first note that the Office of the Chief Executive has itself been created, with its powers, by the Constitution. There are no hereditary Kings in America and no powers not created by the Constitution. So all “inherent powers” must derive from that Constitution.

We have seen in Hamdi that the Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution is fully applicable to the Executive branch’s actions and therefore it can only follow that the First and Fourth Amendments must be applicable as well.

BREAKING: A Federal District Court has ruled that the Bush adminstration’s controversial NSA domestic wiretap operation is unconstitutional, orders immediate halt to program…

UPDATE: PDF of the opinion here.

The Blotter has uncovered interal Department of Justice documents that reveal the president’s decision to deny DOJ investigators a security clearance is unprecedented:

“Since its creation some 31 years ago, OPR has conducted many highly sensitive investigations involving Executive Branch programs and has obtained access to information classified at the highest levels. In all those years, OPR has never been prevented from initiating or pursuing an investigation.”