George W. Bush’s poll numbers have been so bad lately that, if a presidential election were being held today, Bush would have to cheat really, really hard to win.

Bush is so unpopular at the moment that some Republicans in Congress are openly critical of his position on a handful of issues — particularly the plan to turn over operation of some U.S. seaports to a company owned by the government of Dubai, a deal so important to Bush that he threatened to veto any legislative attempt to interfere with it.

For the past five years, the Republican Congress has marched in rigidly-enforced lock-step behind almost every Bush policy, no matter how outrageous, so these rebellious murmurs have attracted a lot of attention.

These are the Republicans who got elected in 2002 by attacking any Democrat who said that in our rush to fight the terrorists, we must be careful not to trample our own rights. They’ve blocked investigations into suspicious no-bid contracts, war profiteering, and billions of dollars just plain missing in Iraq. They stalled an independent investigation into the terrorist attacks. They tried to whitewash the Administration’s response to Katrina.

They spent the Clinton-era budget surplus on tax cuts for millionaires. They tried to re-write their own ethics rules to protect Tom DeLay. They let lobbyists write the legislation on bankruptcy, environmental protection, the Medicare drug program and many other issues. Their House Speaker, Dennis Hastert, declared that no legislation could come to a vote unless a majority of Republicans supported it. Their Senate leader, Bill Frist, said Dick Cheney would declare Senate rules null and void if Democrats dared to prevent some judicial nominations from coming to a vote. Their “K Street Project” was designed to deny lobbying firms that hired Democrats any access to congressional leaders.

If some congressional Republicans now seem to be standing up to the unpopular Mr. Bush, you can rest assured they haven’t abandoned his agenda. The only way they can continue to advance his agenda is to get re-elected in November.

The Republican Congress is still busy writing blank checks for George W. Bush:

Imagine being stopped for speeding and having the local legislature raise the limit so you won’t have to pay the fine. It sounds absurd, but it’s just what is happening to the 28-year-old law that prohibits the president from spying on Americans without getting a warrant from a judge.

It’s a familiar pattern. President Bush ignores the Constitution and the laws of the land, and the cowardly, rigidly partisan majority in Congress helps him out by rewriting the laws he’s broken.

In 2004, to take one particularly disturbing example, Congress learned that American troops were abusing, torturing and killing prisoners, and that the administration was illegally detaining hundreds of people at camps around the world. The chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, John Warner, huffed and puffed about the abuse, but did nothing. And when the courts said the detention camps do fall under the laws of the land, compliant lawmakers simply changed them.

Now the response of Congress to Mr. Bush’s domestic wiretapping scheme is following the same pattern, only worse.

At first, lawmakers expressed outrage at the warrantless domestic spying, and some Democrats and a few Republicans still want a full investigation. But the Republican leadership has already reverted to form. Senator Arlen Specter, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has held one investigative hearing, notable primarily for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’s refusal to answer questions.

Mr. Specter then loyally produced a bill that actually grants legal cover, retroactively, to the one spying program Mr. Bush has acknowledged. It also covers any other illegal wiretapping we don’t know about — including, it appears, entire “programs” that could cover hundreds, thousands or millions of unknowing people.

Mr. Specter’s bill at least offers the veneer of judicial oversight from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. A far more noxious proposal being floated by Senator Mike DeWine, Republican of Ohio, would entirely remove intelligence gathering related to terrorism from the law on spying, known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

…

The administration has assured the nation it had plenty of good reason, but there’s no way for Congress to know, since it has been denied information on the details of the wiretap program. And Senator Pat Roberts, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, seems bent on making sure it stays that way. He has refused to permit a vote on whether to investigate the spying scandal.

Time to throw the bums out.

Angry television writers have something to say about product placement. (Warning: Some material is in rather poor taste. Remember, these guys write for television.)