first censure poll

the first censure poll, from ARG is out Do you favor or oppose the United States Senate passing a resolution censuring President George W. Bush for authorizing wiretaps of Americans within the United States without obtaining court orders? 3/15/06………………..Favor…..Oppose…..Undecided All Adults………………..46%……..44%………10% Voters……………………48%……..43%………..9% Republicans(33%)…….29%……..57%………14% Democrats(37%)……..70%………26%………..4% Independents (30)……42%………47%……….11% Based on 1,100 completed telephone interviews among a random sample of adults nationwide March 13-15, 2006. The theoretical margin of error is plus or minus 3 percentage points, 95% of the time. ---- In a morning statement Senator Feingold said: Last week, with the lack of prospect of senior administration officials from the Justice Department coming before the Judiciary Committee -- those who actually had questioned the program -- and with the essential evisceration of the Intelligence Committee so that the majority of the committee won't ever be allowed, apparently, to even know the merits of the program, in my view not only had the process been stopped, but there was no conversation anymore about one of the fundamental aspects of this, and that is that the president broke the law. Instead, we have people saying, "Well, if this is illegal, we better make it legal." Well, to me that's an important conversation, but it begs the question, what about the fact that the president broke the law. So that's why I chose this time. And let me just read a quote from a few years ago from one of the House managers of the impeachment trial of President Clinton, when they came over to try that case. It's from Congressman James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin, saying that "the rule of law should apply to everyone. And if the president does not suffer the legal and constitutional consequences of his actions, the impact of allowing the president to stand above the law will be felt for generations to come." Well, obviously, I'm not proposing impeachment, and I specifically chose to propose a censure. But it is in that spirit, the spirit that the consequences of this will be felt for generations to come if we don't deal with it. And let me remind everyone that this, of course, has to do primarily with the violation of the law, but it's also in the context of how the president has handled this. On at least three different occasions, he publicly stated -- in Buffalo, New York; in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin; I believe, Columbus, Ohio -- that every time they've got a warrant, every time they want to do wiretapping, they got a warrant. So he was misleading the American people. And then when the program was revealed, instead of saying, "Well, wait a minute, I better check and see if this was legal," he came out aggressively and asserted a doctrine of executive power that is so extreme that it essentially has no end. At the Judiciary Committee hearing that I attended, with seven constitutional scholars, I asked those who believed in this inherent power whether this inherent power would extend to assassinating American citizens, and none of them could give me a colorable or credible answer that it would not. …