On NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday, the chairmen of the Senate and House intelligence… On NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday, the chairmen of the Senate and House intelligence committees, Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., and Rep. Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., matched wits against prominent Democrats Tom Daschle, S.D., and Rep. Jane Harman, Calif., in a titanic policy debate, the likes of which can only be brought to you by network news talk shows.

The debate addressed the recent revelation of a National Security Agency domestic surveillance program that spies on Americans without warrants, the kind of investigative practice conventionally considered to be a flagrant violation of our constitutional rights.

Host Tim Russert asked Roberts, “Do you believe that the Constitution gives the president of the United States the authority to do anything he believes is necessary to protect the country?”

Roberts said, “Yes.”

Roberts declaring that he believes the President can do whatever he deems fit in the name of national security should leave him open to vicious attacks from his politically savvy Democratic opponents on how such a belief flies in the face of the separation of powers that is so essential to the integrity of our democracy. But these are the Democrats we’re talking about.

Daschle, in a blazing display of why he isn’t his party’s Senate leader anymore, countered Roberts’ claim by saying that he sure did like the domestic surveillance program, and thought that it should continue, but that the President ought to have run this by Congress and made sure it was legal first.

Touche.

Roberts contended that select Democrats were briefed on the program in 2002 and that their chance to stop it was then. “It was [the Democrats’] responsibility to use every tool possible to get the president to stop it,” he said.

So, basically, the administration initiated a clandestine NSA spy program – one that is not legal according to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 – and their excuse for this is that the president ought to be above the considerations of such laws and that the Democrats failed to stop them from starting the program in the first place.

First things first: What were the Democrats supposed to do? Harman maintained that Senator John Rockafeller IV, D-W.Va., griped to Vice President Dick Cheney about the program’s legal issues in 2002, but that he and other lawmakers were not in a position to discuss it with lawyers and congressional staffers for fear of violating the Espionage Act and matters of national security because the information was classified at the time. It’s hard to imagine that just appealing without public pressure to the Republican leadership that initiated the program would convince them to kill it themselves.

Second: Is this really what passes for calling the administration out these days in the ranks of the Democratic Party? You’re going to have to do better than, “Gee, we really like your domestic spying program, we just wish you’d asked Congress about it first.” Maybe the reason the Democrats have so much trouble winning battles with this administration is just this kind of feeble approach when it comes to criticizing their policies.

On that note, we present an open message to the Democrats: Did you know it’s an election year? If you have any hopes of correcting the balance of power that has been firmly in favor of the neo-conservative movement since the beginning of the millennium, you need to get yourselves on the same page, take a stand and – we cannot stress this enough – grow a spine.