Specter caves again.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Arlen Specter caved again on NSA oversight. He's leaving that to Dick Cheney now. That's a bit like giving the criminal the keys to the jail cell and asking him to make sure the cell stays locked.

After weeks of anticipation, Senate Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter deferred a decision about whether to force executives from three telecom companies to testify about their involvement in the National Security Agency’s terrorist-surveillance program. His decision came as a total surprise to Democrats on the committee, leading Illinois Democrat Richard Durbin to suggest Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican, had succumbed to a “June swoon.”

According to those in attendance, Specter said he’d been “advised informally” that the phone companies they planned to subpoena — BellSouth, Verizon and AT&T, would be precluded from providing any information about the secret program by the government. Thus, a vote was therefore postponed on the matter, Senate staffers said.

Instead, Specter said Republican Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah had extracted a promise from Vice President Cheney himself to work with the Senate on proposed legislation related to the NSA and its oversight. That pledge was made in a telephone call between Hatch-Cheney just before the panel’s 2 p.m. meeting, which was delayed a half hour.