One of the most valuable but least mourned traditions destroyed by the George W. Bush administration is the quaint notion that the government won't do stuff that's against the law. It used to be the case that Congress could outlaw something, and by virtue of it being outlawed, it could safely be assumed that -- for the most part, at least -- government and political actors wouldn't do that thing. Because it was against the law. And this country was governed by the rule of law. The stain of criminality would be too much for publicly elected officials to withstand.

Well, here's a sampling from just this week of things that we used to assume would never happen -- least of all to what used to be our most cherished civil liberties -- but happened anyway, and for which there's really no particular punishment, and for which the current political climate promises no particular remedy:

The ADVISE system, announced as scrapped this week by the Department of Homeland Security. The Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight and Semantic Enhancement program was: one of the broadest of 12 data-mining projects in the agency... able to ingest 1 billion pieces per hour of structured information, such as databases of cargo shippers, and 1 million pieces per hour from unstructured text, such as government intelligence reports. Why was it scrapped? Pilot tests of the program were quietly suspended in March after Congress' Government Accountability Office warned that "the ADVISE tool could misidentify or erroneously associate an individual with undesirable activity such as fraud, crime or terrorism." Oh, really? Then do you think this was a good way to test the system? Homeland Security's inspector general and the DHS privacy office discovered that tests used live data about real people rather than made-up data for one to two years without meeting privacy requirements. Of course not! Even Joementum agrees: Sen. Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn., chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, said DHS "must follow federal privacy laws — in this case the E-Government Act which requires privacy impact assessments before personal information can be used — in order to maintain public support for these new technologies." Must follow federal privacy laws. Unless it doesn't. In which case Senator Lieberman will do... what, exactly? Right.

National Security Letters, struck down as unconstitutional in federal court yesterday. The same National Security Letters that you may recall were found back in March to have been wildly abused by the FBI.

Unchecked, rampant abuse. Unconstitutional abuse of power. And even the nation's top law enforcement official lying to Congress about it. The inspector general's report prompted an uproar in Congress because Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had testified that there had not been a reported instance of Patriot Act powers being abused. Later, it turned out Gonzales had been aware of the problems with the National Security Letters. The penalty? A tidy retirement package for Abu Gonzales, secured while Congress twiddled its thumbs and maybe, sorta, kinda considered forcing him out instead of holding the door for him. The Federal Records Act and the Presidential Records Act, which both require that the White House preserve records of its official e-mail traffic. You remember, right? The e-mails that the Congress has been seeking with its "subpoena power," but which the "administration" says it lost? Five million times over? Turns out they just, you know, didn't feel like complying with that law, either. And what's the remedy? The National Security Archive is suing the White House. In the meantime, Henry Waxman is investigating, but guess what? The White House says it's not it's fault, because the archiving required by law was contracted out. To whom? They won't tell! The law requires that these things be preserved. But what's the penalty for just not doing it? Nobody knows. In Iran-Contra, we found out that there were no particular penalties described in the Presidential Records Act. And nobody's changed that. It's just... against the law.

And that's just a sampling of this week's action. I didn't even get to the "administration's" continued intransigence over its application of various "national security" and "state secrets" pleadings, which took a hit in court this week too, in connection with the ACLU's FOIA suit over the other domestic spying programs.

All of this must, unfortunately, also be considered in the context of Congressional maneuvering on Iraq as well. Why? Because next week Congress is set to hear testimony from General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker which many observers believe will be misleading at best, and full of outright lies at worst. And this is Congressionally mandated testimony. A report required by law in the last Iraq supplemental. To be delivered, in fact, under the signature of the president. Full of benchmarks and requirements, but no benchmarks or requirements that the reports and testimony be truthful or empirically sound. Because we still take that stuff for granted, even though this "administration" has made a mockery of that assumption too many times to count, and certainly too many times for the Congress to have forgotten. And yet, there it is.

And there's more coming, too. With another $200 billion supplemental on the table, Congress will shortly consider still more guidelines, reporting requirements, and anything-but-timetables.

Given the record, dare we even hope that this time, they'll be viewed as obligations and not merely annoyances that can safely be disposed of with yet another cloud of obfuscation, stonewalling, and outright bullshit?