TPM Reader RP was kind enough to send along this floor speech from Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) on the FBI’s warrant to search Rep. Jefferson’s (D-LA) office …

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Madam Speaker, I disagree with the bipartisan House leadership criticism of the FBI’s search of a Member’s office. I know nothing specifically about the case, except that the uncontroverted public evidence did seem to justify the issuance of a warrant.

What we now have is a Congressional leadership, the Republican part of which has said it is okay for law enforcement to engage in warrantless searches of the average citizen, now objecting when a search, pursuant to a validly issued warrant, is conducted of a Member of Congress.

I understand that the speech and debate clause is in the Constitution. It is there because Queen Elizabeth I and King James I were disrespectful of Parliament. It ought to be, in my judgment, construed narrowly. It should not be in any way interpreted as meaning that we as Members of Congress have legal protections superior to those of the average citizen.

So I think it was a grave error to have criticized the FBI. I think what they did, they ought to be able to do in every case where they can get a warrant from a judge. I think, in particular, for the leadership of this House, which has stood idly by while this administration has ignored the rights of citizens, to then say we have special rights as Members of Congress is wholly inappropriate.

Sounds exactly right to me.

With all the debate about the warrant executed on Rep. Jefferson’s office, let’s not forget the context in which this stink arose.

Earlier this month, we found out that the Duke Cunningham case was expanding and that the Duke case investigators were requesting documents from Congress as part of their probe into the roles of other members of Congress. The response from the Hill was, in so many words, ‘No, You’re asking for too much stuff.’

That response came with Denny Hastert’s seal of approval.

As the Times described the back and forth on May 16th …

Justice Department investigators and lawyers for the House of Representatives are wrangling over a request by the department for Congressional committee documents related to its expanding inquiry into the bribery scheme that involved former Representative Randy Cunningham, a Republican Congressional official said Monday.

The United States attorney’s office in San Diego has asked for copies of ”tens of thousands” of documents from the House Appropriations and Intelligence Committees, the official said, as part of its inquiry into whether Mr. Cunningham illegally influenced the process the committees use to designate money for military projects.

But lawyers for the Republican-controlled House rebuffed the request as unreasonably broad, the official said, and asked the United States attorney’s office for a shorter list.

And who’s in the crosshairs in this expanded Cunningham investigation? “Several members” of the House Appropriations Committee reported the Times back on May 12th. And, in particular, Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-CA), Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee.

Denny Hastert knows what’s coming down the pike. He’s taking the opportunity of the Jefferson search warrant to float this specious constitutional argument and clip the investigators’ wings on the most politically favorable terms.

Here are a few places to look for further discussion of possible constitutional issues raised by the search of Rep. William Jefferson’s (D-LA) Capitol Hill office. First there are these posts by Bob Bauer (one, two and three). Here’s Marty Lederman laying out some of the key potential issues. And here’s Jack Balkin, who is not impressed with the arguments of Hastert and Pelosi.

In general, I stick by my earlier stated belief that there no separation of powers issues raised by the FBI executing a search warrant on a congressman’s office in the conduct of a bribery investigation. Especially, as in this case, when the target was refusing to turn over subpoenaed documents. However, Bauer does point to a development, which has gone largely unremarked, that I think does raise tangible separation of powers issues: the Justice Department’s decision to start conducting ‘interviews‘ with members of Congress to ferret out who was involved in the leaks of the NSA wire-tapping program.

I’ll leave the textual analysis to the law profs. But this kind of scrutiny of Congress is very much the sort of thing the constitution means to prohibit. Go back and read your English history and colonial history, the stuff the constitution writers had as their point of reference.

AP’s Solomon: Sen. Reid (D-NV) voted against state boxing commission after accepting the commission’s boxing tickets which Senate rules say he was allowed to accept.

(All joshing aside, if I didn’t know better I might think that Solomon was developing something of an Ahab complex with that Great White Whale of the Senate, Harry Reid. Back in February, Solomon produced a lengthy expose on Team Abramoff’s alleged efforts to sway Reid to support their Marianas sweatshop clients, without ever mentioning that Reid consistently voted against the Marianas sweatshop owners. That’s a rather salient fact. And once you knew it, the whole piece pretty much collapsed, leaving Solomon with a quid in search of a quo. And perhaps not even a quid. The whole thing was a genuine embarassment. Now, Solomon’s back reporting that Reid accepted boxing tickets he was allowed to accept from his home state’s boxing commission and in exchange voted against the people who gave him the tickets. ( He voted for more federal boxing regs.) When will the corruption end? Paul Kiel has the details.)

All those pieces you missed over the long weekend on Cheney’s crusade for secrecy and the continuing fallout over the FBI’s raid of Jefferson’s Congressional office in today’s Daily Muck.

This is impressive. CNN took John Solomon’s AP piece on Sen. Reid and actually made it even more misleading. More in a moment.

Here’s the run-down of how they managed it.

Update: MSNBC did the same thing.

Later Update: It looks like this was a change that came from the AP.

Uglier and uglier. The FBI is now saying that during their earlier raid on his house, Rep. Jefferson (D-LA) was on the premises during the raid and tried to hide documents from FBI agents as they were conducting the search. That’s not proven. But it’s the sworn testimony of one of the FBI agents.

I don’t know whether Democrats will ever come up wtih those ‘new ideas’ for public policy that so many of the wise people are always clawing for. But I think we can say definitively that the more literary run of magazine journalists will never come up with any new ideas for articles about Democrats to pitch to their editors. I’ve been falling in love again with the New Yorker recently. So Lord knows I don’t want to be critical. But this evening I picked up the copy of the magazine that came out while I was out of the country. And I started reading Jeffrey Goldberg’s piece on the Democrats. And I was just astounded — transfixed, I might almost say — by the sheer dense packing of cliches and the just plain unoriginality of the whole thing.

I think I’ve read this article one hundred times — both in its pre-2006 versions and the new-and-improved 2006 editions.

It goes something like this.

President Bush is very unpopular these days and Democrats think they may win back the Congress because of it. But is hating President Bush enough? Or do Democrats need a positive agenda as an alternative to the Republicans? It is thought by some that it might not be enough. Those somes are right to be worried because there aren’t as many liberals in the US as conservatives. So trying to frame the election around torture and warrantless wiretaps may not be a good idea. Another reason to be worried is that the white working class, farmers, suburbanites and deeply religious are no longer all reliable Democratic constituencies. But there are some candidates trying to reach out to these ignored constituencies. But will those centrists be forced to cater to the party base and its philosophy of pessimism? It is feared by some that they may be forced to cater.

I won’t bore you with any more of my weak parody. But that’s actually not that far from the substance of the article.

What struck me most about this article was how little grasp Goldberg seemed to have of the divisions and cross-cutting alliances that exist in the Democratic party today. Politicians that are darlings of the Democratic blogosphere appear in the piece as its critics and sworn enemies — in most cases, seemingly, based on their willingness to provide a quote taking down one of the author’s straw men.

The online activism world is just one part of the Democratic party equation. But having a little familiarity with it, I think that what stands out about its impulses is its relatively non-ideological nature. If you look at the candidates blogs have gotten behind aggressively, they’re very frequently candidates who don’t meet key liberal litmus tests. This seems lost on Goldberg.

I know I’ve been somewhat harsh in this post and asserted more than I’ve explained or demonstrated. I’ll try to expand on these points and overcome this shortcoming in some follow-up posts. But there are actually some significant and timely issues churning up out of the Democratic party’s struggles today. It would be interesting to talk about them.

Good Times article about Harold Ford’s race for Senate in Tennessee. This’ll be an exciting race.

Feeling hungry? Try Sen. Conrad Burns’ $500-a-plate lobbyist breakfast! Why the cost? We hear it’s heavy on grade-A pork. Also, a former Abramoff associate takes the stand in the trial of White House official David Safavian. This and more in today’s Daily Muck.