The failures of this Congress to do anything to end the Iraq war or to stem the Bush/Cheney executive power grab are apparently all the fault of the Senate. At least that's the message coming from Nancy Pelosi, now out making the rounds on talk shows for her new book.

It actually started at Netroots Nation, when she blamed the FISA capituation on "seventeen Democratic Senators for backing the President's surveillance bill." Yes, there were 17 Democratic Senators who backed the President's FISA bill, but there were also 21 House Blue Dogs who backed the President's FISA bill and managed to bully House leadership into bringing a bad bill to the floor. We can't let it be forgotten that the House was the chamber that brought the FISA "compromise" to the floor and forced it through, despite having been the last chamber to have acted by passing the much better RESTORE Act back in February.

Then, in an appearance this week on the "The View," she had this to say in responding to a question from Joy Behar (at about the 5:50 minute mark) on impeachment.

Her long answer boils down to:

. . . If somebody had a crime that the President had committed, that would be a different story. . . . You can't do that [pursue a legislative agenda] if you're trying to impeach the president at the same time, unless have the goods that the President committed a crime.

Which, of course, we didn't have for the most part because the Democratically controlled Congress largely didn't investigate. I say for the most part because we do know that Bush violated the FISA law. We had the goods on that. What we don't know is the full extent of that lawbreaking because, again, Congress has utterly failed in its job of oversight. It failed so much in that job that, while it was at it, actually took away the judiciary's ability to conduct oversight by granting retroactive amnesty to the telcos.

Which brings us to Pelosi's Monday appearance on "The Daily Show." Here's the critical snippet, starting at about the 4:20 mark:

Q: Is Congress, as it is made up today, obsolete? With a powerful president, is Congress sort of a vestigial -- unless it has 60 votes in the Senate and a huge majority in the House? A: Fair question ... because the fact is the Republicans in Congress vote so much as a rubber stamp with the president that they are abdicating the role of Article I -- we are the first article of the Constitution, the Congress of the United States -- but if you say, "I'm just going to vote with the president, stick with the president every time," then he has power he should not have. Q: Will you exercise that type -- let's say Barrack Obama is fortunate enough to win the presidency ... are you saying that the Democrats will

exercise more and more stringent oversight over a Democratic president than the Republican Congress did over President Bush? A: Well, the same thing -- Q: You'll rubber stamp? A: No rubber stamp. And in terms of, say, for example, domestic surveillance, no president, Democrat or Republican should have the power that this president wanted to have. So it isn't -- and the Congress of the United States has to assert its prerogatives. And this Republican Congress has been a rubber stamp for so long, but that will change.

Um, just to set the record straight here. Pelosi is absolutely right in that no president, Democrat or Republican, should have the power that this president wanted to have in domestic surveillance. Unfortunately, she went along with the Republican rubber stampers to GIVE HIM THAT POWER!

Fine, we're moving along. We're going to have a new president. But redemption for the abysmal performance by this Congress in conducting its job isn't going to come from Pelosi's or any other Congressional leader's revisionist history of how all this went down. It's also not going to come from, as Meteor Blades so succinctly put it, letting bygones be bygones when we have that new president.

Redemption, and restoring the Constitution, is going to come from sunlight, from investigations--both Congressional and by the new President's Justice Department--that shine a bright light on all of the excesses of this administration, running the gamut from torture and illegal domestic spying to the takeover of the Justice Department by political hacks. The nation, the Constitution, deserves no less.