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Republicans and Democrats have separately called for a Congressional probe into United States President George W Bush's decision to use the National Security Agency for domestic spying in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks.
"The President has, I think, made up a law that we never passed," said Senator Russeil Feingold, a Democrat. Republican Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee Senator Arlen Specter said he will be calling for hearings.
"They talk about constitutional authority. There are limits as to what the president can do," he said.
The Senate Democratic Minority Leader Harry Reid has called for an investigation and Democrats in the House of Representatives have called on the speaker to form a bipartisan panel for an investigation.
At the top of the ongoing debate is also if the White House briefed Congressional leaders, especially Democrats on the NSA programme.
The president has said that Capitol Hill was in the game from the very beginning; and law makers while conceding that this may be the case said the President still needs to explain why he chose to ignore the law that requires a special court to be involved in domestic wiretaps.
Senator Reid has stressed that he was briefed on the four-year domestic spy programme "a couple of months ago", but that the Bush administration has to bear the full responsibility for what it did.
"The president can't pass the buck on this one. This is his programme," Senator Reid said. "He's commander in chief. But commander in chief does not trump the Bill of Rights."
Minority leader of the House Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat said she was told on several occasions about unspecified activities of the NSA and that at every time she had expressed strong concerns.
Bush said on Saturday that he had authorised the special NSA programme four years ago in the aftermath of the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, that both the justice department lawyers and the White House counsels had signed off on the programme; and lawmakers were informed.
The president insisted that anything that was done was within the confines of the law and the Constitution.
But Senator Feingold looks at it differently. "It doesn't matter if you tell everybody in the whole country if it's against the law," he said. The Wisconsin Democrat is a member of the Judiciary Committee. His Republican colleague agreed.
"We are at war, and I applaud the president for being aggressive," said Senator Linsey Graham. "But we cannot set aside the rule of law in a time of war."
As the Republicans and Democrats took to the air waves Sunday to hammer the White House on the NSA programme, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice argued that what the president did was legal and necessary to prevent terrorism.
Rice, who was Bush's national security advisor when the programme started, said she was aware of it.
Echoing the president's view, she said disclosures of the eavesdropping jeopardises terrorism investigations."The more we get the exposure of these very sensitive programs, the more it undermines our ability to follow terrorists, to know about their activities," she said.
Rice asserted that what the President did was focussed, it was legal and was not in violation of the United States Constitution.
The programme in the words of Rice was very carefully controlled -- a limited scope on only those who had links with the Al Qaeda.
"The president is acting under his constitutional authority, under statutory authority. The president has gone to great lengths to make certain that he is both living under his obligations to protect Americans from another attack, but also to protect their civil liberties. And that's why this programme is very carefully controlled. It has to be reauthorised every 45 days," Rice said during the course of a Sunday talk show.
"So in a time when the war on terrorism is not just one in which people carry on activities outside the country, but also activities inside the country, the president is drawing on his constitutional authorities to protect the country," she said.
Rice cautioned on using the term "Americans" in a general and broad sense.
"Let's remember that we are talking about the ability to collect information on the geographic territory that is the US. Some people are American citizens. Others are not. What the president wants to prevent is the use of US territory as a safe haven for communications between terrorists operating here or people with terrorist links operating here and people operating outside the country," she said.