“It was a total waste of time,” Jerrold Nadler , D-N.Y., said of the secret session. “Frankly, we think the whole thing was a bluff. But we called it. They thought, ‘We’ll call a secret session and the Democrats will reject it, then we can say they didn’t want to hear all the information.’ ”

...

A dispute broke out when an unnamed Republican started to talk about a topic that Democrats considered off limits under the ground rules for the session, since it was at a higher security clearance level than the discussion up to that point. But one Republican lawmaker said the discussion was in bounds. “We tried to give them the information, but they didn’t want to hear it,” the lawmaker said.

Ding!

Tom Price , R-Ga., said he was disappointed by the partisanship on the floor during the closed session. “There were two different camps in the approach. One camp was interested in talking about issues. The other camp was talking about . . . politics,” Price said.

Will someone please tell me where Republicans have discussed the issues? Have they explained why President Bush thinks the Electronic Frontier Foundation sees "a financial gravy train" in these lawsuits? Is there a place where they describe just exactly how the system they have established prevents their domestic surveillance apparatus from being abused for domestic political purposes? Have they explained why amnesty will not create perverse incentives for telecoms to comply with unwarranted surveillance in the future?

James T. Walsh was one Republican who questioned the value of the session. “What we heard was marginally classified,” he said. “The really secret stuff, we couldn’t talk about.”

“We saved him,” one said. “He probably would have been disciplined.”

From the headlines:

They discussed his reputation as a "difficult" man who sometimes asked "to do things you might not think were safe."

"I mean, it’s just kind of like ... whatever ... I’m here for a purpose. I know what my purpose is. I am not a ... moron, you know what I mean."

From the archive:

Is more what we really need?

In my opinion not.

But more listening is what the NSA knows how to organize, more is what Congress is ready to support and fund, more is what the President wants, and more is what we are going to get.

To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self-disciplined is to follow in a better way.

Outsiders sometimes find it tempting to dismiss such wheel-spinning as bureaucratic silliness, but I believe that the Judiciary Committee will find, if it is willing to persist, that within the large pointless program there exists a small, sharply focused program that delivers something the White House really wants. This it will never confess willingly.