By Andrew L. Jaffee

“We support the NSA domestic surveillance program, but only if we get to score the political points.” This is the best the Democrats have to offer? It wasn’t that long ago that Ted Kennedy said of the program, “This is Big Brother run amok.” Now support for “domestic spying?” The Dems were briefed by the White House regarding the program’s details quite awhile ago, first seemed to forget, then remembered, sort of — but now that’s water under the bridge? Are cracks appearing in the party’s armor (not that there weren’t any in the first place). From the Washington Post:

Two key Democrats yesterday called the NSA domestic surveillance program necessary for fighting terrorism but questioned whether President Bush had the legal authority to order it done without getting congressional approval.

Rep. Jane Harman (Calif.), ranking Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and former Senate majority leader Thomas A. Daschle (S.D.) said Republicans are trying to create a political issue over Democrats’ concern on the constitutional questions raised by the spying program.

Nothing like some good fence-straddling. Here’s the big but:

At the same time, the Republican chairmen of the Senate and House intelligence committees — Sen. Pat Roberts (Kan.) and Rep. Peter Hoekstra (Mich.), who attended secret National Security Agency briefings — said they supported Bush’s right to undertake the program without new congressional authorization. They added that Democrats briefed on the program, who included Harman and Daschle, could have taken steps if they believed the program was illegal. All four appeared on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Roberts said he could not remember Democrats raising questions about the program during briefings that, beginning in 2002, were given to the “Gang of Eight.” That group was made up of the House speaker and minority leader, the majority and minority leaders of the Senate, and the chairmen and ranking Democrats of the House and Senate intelligence committees.

At the briefings, Roberts said, “Those that did the briefing would say, ‘Do you have questions? Do you have concerns?’ ” Hoekstra said if Democrats thought Bush was violating the law, “it was their responsibility to use every tool possible to get the president to stop it.”

This is just evidence of further splintering of Democratic ranks. Joe Lieberman, bless his heart, has publicly come out in support of the Iraq war on several occasions, and supports Bush’s war policy there. Imagine how Kennedy speaks of Lieberman behind closed doors.

Maybe the splintering is a good thing. The Democratic Party needs to find its footing and get itself out from under the domination of the Al Gore/Ted Kennedy types, who put self-serving, stuck-in-Vietnam, dogmatic, demagoguery above all else. I doubt that America’s center of the political spectrum, where her true wisdom lives, adheres to this far-Left diatribe. But who knows? The Right has been shooting itself in its collective feet — literally.

Until the Democrats embrace the center, unfortunately, we will not have a relevant opposition party.

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Related: United States, War Against Islamo-fascism

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