And I couldn't think of a better story to report on for my 500th entry! It's been three years and five hundred entries since I started this blog back in 2003. That's a long time.

The New York Times reports today that Sen. Arlen Specter, R-PA, is furious with Vice President Dick Cheney. In a letter sent to Cheney and the press, Specter revealed that the vice president intentionally kept him out of negotiations with other members of the Senate Judiciary Committee -- of which he is the chairman -- regarding the illegal, poorly-justified, warrantless wiretaps of United States persons. Cheney and other Republicans on the committee apparently came to an agreement that no telecom company executives would testify in front of the Judiciary Committee -- a decision that Specter is unhappy with. He is one of the few Republican voices that dares criticize the Bush administration. In his letter, he said that "the administration is continuing warrantless wiretaps in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and is preventing the Senate Judiciary Committee from carrying out its constitutional responsibility for Congressional oversight."

If Cheney manages to threaten enough Senate Republicans, the other Republicans on the committee could vote Specter off the Judiciary Committee altogether. Specter has been critical of the administration's broad (and largely self-invented) assertions of executive power, which could get him into trouble with Cheney.

Last week, the Boston Globe revealed that Cheney's assistants personally review every piece of legislation that is scheduled to come before the president and check for any language that might limit the president's power. The assistants then recommend that the president add a "signing statement" in which he says that he refuses to abide by any law that limits his constitutional powers as president. It helps, of course, if you believe that the Constitution places no limitations on your presidential power, and therefore any legislative oversight at all (like the anti-torture amendment introduced by John McCain) is a limitation that the president won't abide by.

It should be noted that, in his five years in office, Bush has issued more than 750 "signing statements," more than every president before him combined. If a signing statement issue came before the Supreme Court, I'm quite confident that the Supremes would declare the signing statement's weight as law unconstitutional for the same reasons they declared the line-item veto unconstitutional.

Cheney is at the forefront of taking power from the legislature and giving it to the executive, whether through quasi-legal means, like signing statements, or through outright intimidation via Karl Rove. Specter has called him out on it; now how will the administration smear him? Will it suggest that he wasn't invited to meet with the vice president because, like Richard Clarke, he's "out of the loop"? (And, like Richard Clarke, when you're the chairman, it's hard to be "out of the loop" unless you're deliberately excluded.)

Zarqawi killed in Iraq

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of the terrorist group called Al-Qaeda in Iraq, was killed in an airstrike yesterday. This is good news. Osama bin Laden remains at large. This is bad news.

I wonder if warrantless wiretapping tipped the U.S. off to Zarqawi's whereabouts?