Show me the memos: My pal Howard Dean, chair of the Democratic Party, sent me an e-mail this afternoon urging me to sign the Dems’ petition to shake loose Justice Dept. memos created to cover George Bush’s lying and spying through the Freedom of Information Act. So I signed it because it just might be the first step down the path to impeachment.

Here’s what Howard wrote:

By now you have probably heard the news that George Bush is using the National Security Agency to conduct surveillance on American citizens without the consent of any court. After initially refusing to confirm the story, the President has admitted to personally overseeing this domestic spying program for years and he says he intends to continue the program.

These actions explicitly violate a law designed to protect US citizens. But the administration says that other laws somehow allow for this unprecedented use of a foreign intelligence agency to spy on Americans right here in the United States. According to reports, political appointees in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel wrote still-classified legal opinions laying out the supposed justification for this program.

I have asked our General Counsel to draft a Freedom of Information Act request for the relevant legal opinions and memos written by that office. Since the program’s existence is no longer a secret, these memos should be released — Americans deserve to know exactly what authority this administration believes it has.

You can help pressure the administration to release these documents by signing on to our Freedom of Information Act request in the next 48 hours.

This extra-legal activity is even more disturbing because it is unnecessary — the administration already has access to a secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. That court was created precisely to provide speedy, secure judicial review to the actions of our intelligence agencies.

To allow authorities act as quickly as possible, officials can even apply for a retroactive warrant days after the surveillance has already begun. Secret warrants have been approved over 19,000 times — only five applications were rejected in nearly thirty years. The court, which regularly acts within hours, is hardly a roadblock, but it prevents abuse by providing the oversight required by our system of checks and balances.

This administration must demonstrate clearly what legal authority allows it to disregard criminal prohibitions on unilateral domestic spying. Sign on to the request now — it will be delivered on Thursday.

In an interview on Monday, Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez admitted that the administration asked certain Members of Congress about getting a new law to allow spying on Americans without a warrant. Realizing that even a Republican-controlled Congress wouldn’t authorize such a measure, they decided to manipulate current law and proceed with the program anyway.

Manipulation of a law like this is dangerous. The same Office of Legal Counsel used vague assertions of sweeping authority in the infamous torture memos. The victim of this reasoning is the rule of law itself — when this administration asserts sweeping authority to step over any line of legality, it asserts that there are no lines at all.

Does this administration believe there are any lines it can’t cross? Americans deserve to know.