Nixon aide testifies at Bush censure hearing

updated 1:30 p.m. ET March 31, 2006

WASHINGTON - Nixon White House counselor John Dean asserted Friday that President Bush’s domestic spying exceeds the wrongdoing that toppled his former boss from power, and a veteran Republican snapped that Democrats were trying to “score political points” with motion to censure Bush.

“Had the Senate or House, or both, censured or somehow warned Richard Nixon, the tragedy of Watergate might have been prevented,” Dean told the Senate Judiciary Committee. “Hopefully the Senate will not sit by while even more serious abuses unfold before it.”

Testifying to a Senate committee on Wisconsin Democratic Sen. Russell Feingold’s resolution to censure Bush, Dean said the president “needs to be told he cannot simply ignore a law with no consequences.”

Republicans, who scheduled the hearing, dismissed Feingold’s resolution as an election year stunt.

At issue is whether Bush’s secretive domestic spying program violates the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Bush has said the National Security Agency’s secretive wiretapping program is aimed at finding terrorists before they strike on American soil by tapping the phones of people making calls overseas. He has launched a criminal investigation to find out who leaked the program’s existence to the New York Times, saying it compromised national security.

Feingold’s measure would condemn Bush’s “unlawful authorization of wiretaps of Americans within the United States without obtaining the court orders required” by the FISA act.

Dean: Separation vs. isolation
“To me, this is not really and should not be a partisan question,” Dean told the panel. “I think it’s a question of institutional pride of this body, of the Congress of the United States.”

He added in prepared testimony that if Congress doesn’t have the stomach for Feingold’s resolution as drafted, it should pass some measure serving Bush a warning.

“The resolution should be amended, not defeated, because the president needs to be reminded that separation of powers does not mean an isolation of powers,” Dean said in prepared remarks.

Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., said Feingold’s resolution has no merit.

“But it provides a forum for the discussion of issues which really ought to be considered in greater depth than they have been,” Specter said at the session’s open.

Feingold told the panel that censure is not only an appropriate response, but Congress’ duty.

“If we in the Congress don’t stand up for ourselves and the American people, we become complicit in the lawbreaking,” Feingold said. “The resolution of censure is the appropriate response.”

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