When you’re President of the United States, you know your political career is in trouble when prominent members of your own party are criticizing your decisions. And what a criticism it was. Rep. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) said today that if Bush believed he could just conduct surveillance on Americans without getting a warrant, “He’s smoking [Old] Dutch Cleanser.”

Republicans and Democrats alike grilled Attorney General Albert Gonzales today in a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the “terrorist surveillance program” conducted by the National Security Agency. And they said they weren’t finished with him and would continue the hearing on a second day.

Specter said Sunday he believes the program violates the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978.

I watched most of the hearing today, though I wasn’t able to attend the whole thing. While I expected it would run most or all of the day, even I was surprised to find out it would be extended to a second day.

My favorite part, though, was Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) playing good cop to everyone else’s bad cop, offering kind words and sympathy in counterpoint to hard-hitting questions from both sides of the aisle.

“We are not going hog wild restraining American liberties,” Sessions told Gonzales. “In fact, the trend has been to provide more and more protections.”

Some of the NSA program’s sharpest critics have been libertarian groups, such as the Cato Institute.

“The overriding issue that’s at stake in these hearing is the stance of the administration that they’re going to decide in secrecy which laws they’re going to follow and which laws they can bypass,” said Timothy Lynch, director of Cato’s project on criminal justice. Conservative Web sites and blogs appear to be “fairly evenly divided” on the NSA program, he said. — Washington Post

This libertarian is watching carefully and will have to remember to have popcorn on hand for the next hearings which are sure to follow.