the other two branches

Congress beginning to stretch its arm. Glenn Greenwald sums it all up in this post:

It has been more than six months since The New York Times revealed that President Bush ordered eavesdropping on American citizens in violation of the criminal law. Virtually all national politicians and media figures, not to mention scores of pro-Bush bloggers, boastfully predicted that the entire matter would be swept away and easily resolved long before now. But it hasn't been and isn't close to being resolved, and there are slow, steady rumblings that more and more members of Congress are becoming less willing, not more, to allow the President to seize all governmental power.

These developments happen slowly and incrementally, and it therefore seems as though nothing is happening. But scandals of this type take time and significant effort to unfold. An amendment to cut off all funding for the warrantless eavesdropping program -- something unmentionable a few months ago -- almost passed the House last night, and had more than a handful of Republicans supporting it. And the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee spontaneously directed the Justice Department and the President to turn over all documents relating to efforts to "induce" telephone companies to provide calling data on Americans.

Even the most impatient and cynical among us must acknowledge that those are surprisingly encouraging developments. One of the oddest aspects of the President's lawlessness has been the degree to which members of Congress have been willing to endure such severe institutional humiliations by essentially being written out of our Government -- the opposite of what the Founders assumed would occur simply by virtue of basic human nature and dignity, which they believed would inevitably engender fights against efforts to render any one particular branch irrelevant. Perhaps Congress is slowly beginning to regain some dignity and purpose and insist upon imposing some limits on the President's monarchical powers.