The politics of censure.

Byline: The Register-Guard

Trying to sort through the politics and get to the substance of Sen. Russ Feingold's proposal to censure President Bush is a bit like walking down an escalator that's going up. The destination may be clearly visible, but even with steady effort, it doesn't seem to get much closer.

Feingold, a Democrat from Wisconsin, argues that President Bush violated the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act when he ordered the National Security Agency to bypass the warrant process and spy on communications between people in the United States and suspected terrorists abroad.

The administration disputes the charge, claiming that the powers granted by Congress when it authorized military action against al-Qaeda and the inherent powers of the president acting as commander in chief in a time of war give him the authority to order the wiretaps.

That's a dandy separation-of-powers constitutional dispute, with no slam-dunk winner on either side.

Judge Harold Baker, a federal judge in Illinois who served on the FISA court until last year, said the president was bound by the law "like everyone else." Judge Baker testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that if a law like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is duly enacted by Congress and considered constitutional, "the president ignores it at the president's peril."

But Bush has some court precedents on his side, and his actions are consistent with those of previous wartime presidents. The administration's position might prevail in a court test. In any event, few are eager to fault a president for doing too much, rather than too little, to protect the nation from attack.

Enter Feingold's censure resolution. Feingold may run for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, so his censure effort is suffused with political overtones and vulnerable to criticism that it is self-serving.

Since dropping the censure bomb on his unsuspecting Senate colleagues, Feingold has vaulted to the top of national newscasts and political blogs. The censure resolution energized the left wing of the Demo- cratic Party and made the party establishment, including presidential rivals Sens. Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, appear spineless in their rush to back away from Feingold.

Even if the censure resolution were to pass - which is about as likely as President Bush admitting that invading Iraq was a mistake - the measure has no consequences. It's but a toothless scolding for what Feingold has charged is a presidential violation of the law: an impeachable offense. Although the Senate has voted nine times to censure its own members, including Joe McCarthy in 1954, the last president censured was Andrew Jackson in 1834.

Whatever its ramifications for Feingold, the censure resolution also pushed political buttons for Democrats hoping to capture Republican seats in the November elections. Republicans sought to exploit the brouhaha to change the subject from the president's plummeting approval ratings, growing public opposition to the war in Iraq, the bungled federal response to Hurricane Katrina, a disastrous debut for the Medicare prescription drug plan and the Dubai ports deal.

Far from being spineless, many Democrats have good reason to question the motives and timing of Feingold's censure measure. They see a showdown over censure as an internally divisive distraction from the laundry list of administration failures that have raised Democratic hopes for gains in November. With polls showing almost half of independent voters leery of censure and Democrats needing support from those voters to take back Republican seats, censure isn't a clear winner for all Democrats.

Finally, Republicans are playing a familiar political game with the censure resolution by trying to portray "criticism of the president in wartime" as cravenly partisan and dangerously unpatriotic. They attempt to convince the public that the censure fight actually helps Republicans and hurts Democrats.

Nonsense. There is nothing remotely positive for Republicans about having Congress engaged in a prime-time debate over whether a Republican president violated the law and subverted the Constitution.

Contrary to popular opinion, there is such a thing as bad publi- city.