Consider, if you will, the word oversight. It can mean (1) failure to notice or consider, as in the sentence: “It was an oversight on Dick Cheney’s part not to look around carefully before firing his shotgun.� Paradoxically, the word can also mean (2) watchful care, as in the sentence: “Before selling their souls, the members of Congress exercised some oversight over the executive branch.� The former definition implies a certain passivity or ignorance; the latter suggests discernment and taking action.

Sadly, but not surprisingly, the Republican majority in Congress—along with many of their meeker Democratic colleagues—would appear to prefer oversight (1) to oversight (2), particularly when it comes to holding the Bush Administration accountable for their illegal actions (e.g., warrantless surveillance of Americans), their ineptitude (e.g., response to Hurricane Katrina), and their dissembling (e.g., the war in Iraq). In failing to adequately notice or consider these many offenses—and often consciously so—it can be argued that the legislative branch has, in effect, abrogated one of their most fundamental responsibilities and, in so doing, left their constituents (and perhaps all of humankind) out in the cold without proper cover. Can you feel the chill? Perhaps the following editorial from Monday’s New York Times will evoke shivers in your soul:

A Kabuki Congress

It’s a familiar pattern. President George W. Bush ignores the Constitution and the laws of the land, and the cowardly, rigidly partisan majority in Congress helps him out by rewriting the laws he’s broken.

In 2004, to take one particularly disturbing example, Congress learned that U.S. troops were abusing, torturing and killing prisoners, and that the administration was illegally detaining hundreds of people at camps around the world. When the courts said the detention camps do fall under the laws of the land, compliant lawmakers simply changed them.

Now the response of Congress to Bush’s domestic wiretapping scheme is following the same pattern, only worse.

At first, lawmakers expressed outrage at the warrantless domestic spying, and some Democrats and a few Republicans still want a full investigation. But the Republican leadership has already reverted to form. Senator Arlen Specter, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, held one investigative hearing, then loyally produced a bill that actually grants legal cover, retroactively, to the one spying program Bush has acknowledged. It also covers any other illegal wiretapping we don’t know about – including, it appears, entire “programs” that could cover hundreds, thousands or millions of unknowing people.

Let’s call this what it is: a shell game. The question is whether the Bush administration broke the law by allowing the National Security Agency to spy on Americans and others in the United States without obtaining the required warrant. The White House wants Americans to believe that the spying is restricted only to conversations between agents of Al Qaeda and people in the United States. But the administration has not offered the slightest evidence that it could not have efficiently monitored those Qaeda-related phone calls and e-mail messages while following the existing rules.

In other words, there is not a shred of proof that the illegal program produced information that could not have been obtained legally, had the administration wanted to bother to stay within the law.

The administration has assured Americans it had plenty of good reason, but there’s no way for Congress to know, since it has been denied information on the details of the wiretap program. And Senator Pat Roberts, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, seems bent on making sure it stays that way. He has refused to permit a vote on whether to investigate the spying scandal.

Putting on face paint and pretending that illusion is reality is fine for Kabuki theater. Congress should have higher standards.