The good news, people keep telling us, is that Congress – accidentally stumbling across some institutional self-respect – is finally facing up to the Bush administration’s claim of constitutional superpowers.

The bad news is what Congress is actually doing.

Tuesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee actually got Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to come by and talk about the National Security Agency wiretapping without judicial warrants, ignoring a law passed by, um, the Senate. Among other things, senators wondered why the investigation of the issue by the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility was blocked by its lawyers being denied security clearance – for the first time ever.

Asked what happened, Gonzales – who generally treats senators like particularly boring in-laws – explained, “As with all decisions that are non-operational in terms of who has access to the program, the president of the United States makes the decision.”

The expansion of the presidency continues. Bush’s claim, through signing statements, to decide which parts of laws are actually enforced is now matched with the power to prevent any investigation of his decisions by declaring the material involved too secret for his own Justice Department to consider.

It’s a wonder Gonzales even bothers to show up to sneer at the senators.

You might think this would particularly annoy Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., who regularly makes threatening faces about defending the Constitution and the rights of the Senate, and who has now produced a bill to straighten out the whole wiretapping issue.

After extensive, delicate negotiations with the White House, Specter resolved the issue by surrendering everything.

To complaints that the NSA was wiretapping individuals without judicial approval, the bill lets the agency get a single court order to cover thousands of wiretappings. To complaints that the NSA didn’t even bother to get wiretaps approved afterward, the bill extends the post-bugging deadline to a year. And to the administration’s insistence that it doesn’t need judges at all, the bill says meekly, “Nothing in this Act shall be construed to limit the constitutional authority of the president to collect intelligence. …”

By tough bargaining, Specter retained the right to be called “Senator.”

Wednesday, testifying before the House intelligence committee, American Bar Association President Michael S. Greco took a deep breath and declared, “… (T)he Specter-White House proposal is an enormous and unwarranted departure from the (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) framework and the particular requirements of the Fourth Amendment, which require that any government surveillance be reasonable, supported by individual warrants issued by courts, and based upon specific probable cause in each case.”

Warning that other parts of the bill would “seriously compromise the confidence of citizens in the independence of judicial review and in the legality of the government’s actions,” Greco concluded, “The ABA sees little to support in this proposal.”

No wonder the Bushies use their own lawyers.

“When you read the proposal, they get a bonanza,” says Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Not only does the administration face no new limits, “They get to filet the only law that’s on the books now.”

So why would Specter, after all his posturing, sponsor this proposal?

Says Wyden, “Beats me,” which is what the administration does to Congress all the time.

But Thursday brought another signal on the subject, on an Electronic Frontier Foundation lawsuit challenging the legality of the NSA program and AT&T’s cooperation with it. The administration asked the judge to throw out the case because it involved secret material.

U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker refused.

“The compromise between liberty and security remains a difficult one,” Walker ruled. “But dismissing this case at the outset would sacrifice liberty for no apparent enhancement of security.”

Imagine if he were in Congress.