At some point early Tuesday morning, DeLay appears to have found just such a thing. In an 11th-hour deal, House and Senate leaders inserted language into the energy bill that could funnel as much as $1.5 billion through a Sugar Land nonprofit to fund research and development for “ultra-deepwater and unconventional” natural gas drilling. The deal has been in the works for years — versions of the proposal passed the House in several bills that did not become law — but rank-and-file Democrats in the House have cried foul over the process.

“Members of the conference committee had no opportunity to consider or reject this measure,” complained Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., in a letter to House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., on Wednesday. That is because the ultra-deep program appeared in the final version of the energy bill only after the last meeting for amendments had been gaveled to a close.

House Democrats knew something was afoot on Monday night. Around 7 p.m., they received an e-mail with the ultra-deep language, hours after the deadline for final amendments. “I just got this thing on my BlackBerry,” said one Democratic aide who worked on the bill. “I was like, What the heck is this?” The e-mail was not mentioned by House and Senate negotiators as they worked well into the night to hammer out final changes. Nonetheless, by the following afternoon, ultra-deep had found its way into the bill. “It just got added sometime between 3 a.m. Tuesday and 12 noon,” the aide said.

As it turns out, the Democratic and Republican leaders of the House and Senate energy committees, a group called “the big four,” had approved the language at the last minute. Fingers still pointed to DeLay as a driver for the program. “This is something that Mr. DeLay obviously has been interested in for a while,” said Bill Wicker, a spokesman for Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., one of the big four. “He has done a pretty effective job of keeping his fingerprints off of things.”

The idea for an ultra-deep-research fund dates back to 1999, when the National Petroleum Council, an Energy Department advisory group, concluded that the nation needed better technology to seek out hard-to-reach gas deposits. A little-known nonprofit called the Gas Technology Institute, which is made up of more than 350 natural-gas-related companies and consultants, decided to begin lobbying for the money. Between 2002 and 2004, they spent $580,000 on lobbyist C. Kyle Simpson, a former Energy Department official, to work the issue on Capitol Hill.

According to a 2003 tax filing, the GTI board of directors includes the top executives of more than a dozen gas companies, including Noble Energy, the KeySpan Corp. and ChevronTexaco. But Melanie Kenderdine, a former Energy Department official who works at GTI, says the real beneficiaries of the ultra-deep program will be consumers. “Far and away the most effective way to increase supply and reduce prices is to invest in technology,” she said. “That’s where the public interest comes in.”

Sugar Land, Texas, enters the picture because a GTI offshoot called Research Partnership to Secure Energy for America (RPSEA), is the leading contender to win the contract to administer the new program. RPSEA members include giant gas-drilling companies like Halliburton and Schlumberger. Kenderdine said RPSEA moved to Sugar Land because the group was offered a rent rebate, not because DeLay calls it home. DeLay’s office declined to describe his involvement in the last-minute maneuvers. “Mr. DeLay is always up to date on legislation,” said Ben Porritt, a DeLay spokesman.

Critics note that DeLay is not the only pork-hungry politician to exploit the energy bill. Among the other big-ticket items are $80 million for a coal plant in Alaska, $1.25 billion for a hydrogen-producing nuclear reactor in Idaho, and $1 billion in new tax breaks for companies that own natural gas pipelines. “There is not enough policy in this bill to justify all the pork,” says Navin Nayak, an environmental advocate for the U.S. Public Interest Research Group. “It’s embarrassing.”

On the House floor Thursday, Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., took the microphone to protest what he saw as a giant giveaway of taxpayer money. He stood next to an oversize poster of an oil rig resting on a photocopy of a Social Security card. “What the Republicans are doing is erecting a huge oil rig on top of the Social Security Trust Fund,” Markey declared.

But his protest was just bluster. The fight is over. The bill is expected to reach the president’s desk within days. “We thank Mr. Markey for the use of his chart, once again,” quipped Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, one of the big four, when Markey ran out of time.

Now the country faces a nominee, John G. Roberts Jr., whom prominent conservatives have likened to a Scalia “without the fireworks.” But more than a week after the nomination, Aron says she is not ready to oppose Roberts. “We’re doing our best to press the senators to do a full and thorough investigation,” Aron says instead, sitting in her office that overlooks Washington’s Dupont Circle on Tuesday. “I don’t know what the record will show.”

Such words do not come easily to the head of the Alliance, the umbrella group for more than 70 environmental, consumer and civil rights groups. Aron has known for years that Roberts was in the pipeline for the job, but she also knew there was little public information to evaluate his record. “I’ve long assumed that once John Roberts was confirmed for the D.C. Circuit that just like Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia, he was headed to the Supreme Court,” Aron says. “I also knew, based on his thin public record, he would be the hardest nominee to challenge.”

That premonition helps explain the early success of President Bush’s nominee rollout. While Roberts smiled for the cameras, liberal interest groups spent much of the last two weeks on the sideline, muted by everything they do not know. Gone, at least for now, are clear threats of a “divisive confirmation battle” or warnings that a conservative pick would cause a “constitutional catastrophe.” President Bush picked a judge of the highest reputation and credentials, a corporate lawyer with Democratic friends, the looks of a Boy Scout leader, and a family that evokes Kennedy comparisons. But all those advantages pale in comparison to his most appealing quality for Republicans: Roberts lacks any substantive public record that advocates like Aron could use to mount their attacks. Pro-life, anti-gay rights, and pro-business conservatives are happy with the selection. But for many liberal groups, he remains hidden in plain sight.

Lacking a smoking gun, interest groups on the left have found themselves, at least initially, divided on message. Most of the large pro-choice and women’s rights groups, including NARAL, the National Organization for Women, and the Feminist Majority, have opposed Roberts as a direct threat to legal abortions and the health of women. They have been organizing letter-writing campaigns, planned a national “call-in day” for the Senate, and launched new fundraising appeals. They point to the work Roberts did on behalf of the first Bush administration opposing Roe v. Wade.

By contrast, groups like the Alliance for Justice and People for the American Way — two of the organizations that warned of an all-out war with the White House — have taken a wait-and-see approach. They distinguish between his work as an attorney for a client and his own personal views. “If we are asking the Senate to be careful and deliberate, then we have to, in the same way, take the same stance,” says Karen Pearl, the interim president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, a member of the Alliance for Justice.

Instead of railing against Roberts, the larger groups have crafted a far more procedural set of talking points. “The White House Must Release Information,” blares a recent press release from People for the American Way. “The American people must know the whole truth,” reads an Alliance release. “It’s not sexy,” Kelly Landis, a spokeswoman for the Alliance, says of the more nuanced approach. “I never claimed it was sexy. It’s nevertheless a vitally important message.”

Tuesday’s release of documents from Roberts’ time in the Reagan Justice Department provides some hint of what the liberal interest groups hope to find out. It is the first of what promises to be a steady stream of new documents emerging from the archives of the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations. More important, the professional memos show Roberts writing about his own views, not those of his client. The first batch include memos showing that Roberts argued for the possibility of restricting the Supreme Court’s ability to weigh in on cases regarding abortion, school prayer and school busing. He also argued for a narrow interpretation of Title IX, the law that calls for sex equality in athletic funding, and criticized the “perfectly circular” arguments he found in a report that defended affirmative action.

The White House has so far refused to release similar documents from Roberts’ time as deputy solicitor general for President George H.W. Bush, saying it needs to protect attorney-client privilege.

Aron hopes the release of documents shedding light on Roberts’ views will help avoid a repeat of his 2003 confirmation hearings to the D.C. Circuit Court. At the time, Roberts came before the Senate with glowing recommendations and almost no public record. Nonetheless, Republicans seemed determined to get him through committee with a minimum of scrutiny. Then-Judiciary Committee chairman Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, scheduled a hearing on Roberts with two more explosive Circuit Court nominees, Deborah Cook and Jeffrey Sutton. Pressed for time, Democrats focused their questions on the two nominees with the longest records. “I was up there,” Aron says of the hearings. “That was a horrible day.”

Roberts passed out of committee, but only as part of a compromise with Sen. Hatch, a deal that would allow Democrats to block other nominees. “Democratic Committee staff had a lot of concerns of Roberts at his hearings in 2003,” says a former committee staffer. “But he was allowed a vote as part of an agreement for Republicans to reinstate the committee filibuster rule.” When he reached the full Senate, Democrats asked for unanimous consent to pass Roberts. Worried that he might later be nominated to the Supreme Court, they did not want to have their votes for him on the record.

No one expects Roberts to get such an easy pass this time around. “When I talk to Republicans in the Senate side, they don’t think the fight is over,” says Grover Norquist, a GOP stalwart who regularly consults with Karl Rove and Senate leaders. “I think the left’s divisions are tactical.” Liberal groups, he says, are probably just keeping their powder dry for the September hearings, or for another nominee. “It would be smart for the left to say, ‘Do we really want to have that fight now, and lose the ability to have it in the future?’”

In the meantime, the Alliance’s offices continue to operate on a war footing. About 20 interns and lawyers have been brought in for the summer, lining the corridors with fresh-faced men and women in their 20s, who sit at cramped desks. They publish a podcast and several Web sites, a blog, and, according to Landis, hold the trigger of an e-mail list of about 30,000 “e-activists throughout the country ready to take action and organize at a moment’s notice.” In his office, Adam Shah, the Alliance’s 32-year-old senior counsel, sits behind a desk overrun with paper. Nearby, he has stacked thousands more pages, the briefs from Roberts’ past cases. “As a judge he has sat on 400 cases,” says Shah. “He has only written 44 of those. And only five of them are cases in which one of the judges disagreed.”

To date, those five cases have provided only the smallest window into the mind of Judge Roberts. Aron, whose office is decorated with the roll call vote from her attempt to block the nomination of former Attorney General John Ashcroft, can do little more at this point than demand more information. “This is an individual who has been a part of every significant legal issue facing this country for the past 20 years,” Aron explained. “It’s obvious he has views.”

It’s just not obvious what they are. For now, that means Roberts is well on his way to a new, lifetime job.

About 90 minutes later, it was over. The dainty Miller was escorted off to jail by U.S. marshals twice her size. She will serve up to four months in a nearby prison for refusing to divulge the identity of a source who talked to her about Valerie Plame, a covert CIA agent outed by unknown administration officials in 2003 because her husband had criticized the White House. Cooper, on the other hand, received last-minute permission to divulge his source’s identity to a grand jury investigating the matter, freeing him to go home to see his 6-year-old son. None of it made much sense, but then the investigation of the Plame leak never has. The columnist who revealed her secret identity, Robert Novak, appears to have never faced the threat of jail. Investigators have targeted two other reporters instead — Miller, who never wrote about Plame, and Cooper, who only wrote about the craven motivations behind Novak’s story. Many legal observers doubt that a crime has even been committed.

It was not just the journalists who were baffled. For the lawyers, the special counsel and even the judge, the court proceedings had all the trappings of a scene from Alice in Wonderland. “Your honor, I am not Alice,” said Miller’s attorney, Robert S. Bennett, when he rose to address the court. “But I somehow feel that I am. I am as perplexed as she was.” Judge Hogan seemed to agree last week when he said the arguments in the case were becoming, as Alice would say, “curiouser and curiouser.” Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald spoke of peering “through the looking glass” and down the “rabbit hole.”

Only Cooper and Miller seemed to have a clear focus, even if they did make an odd couple exchanging glances across the defense table. Cooper is without question the most teddy bear-like member of the White House press corps, a family guy and a part-time standup comedian whose smile rivals that of John Edwards and whose imitation of Bill Clinton rivals that of Darrell Hammond. By contrast, Miller is coming off a run as journalism’s femme fatale in a fierce brunette bob. Her role as Ahmed Chalabi’s conduit for bogus WMD rumors helped seduce the nation into a false rationale for war. Now, just three years later, she has been remade as a sort of patron saint for the First Amendment. “My motive here is straightforward,” she told the court, dressed casually in a quilted blue jacket. “A promise of confidentiality once made must be respected, or the journalist will lose all credibility and the public will, in the end, suffer.”

Luckily for Cooper, he did not have to face that decision in the end, though few doubt that he would have gone to jail to protect his source. On Thursday, Norman Pearlstine, the editor in chief of Time Inc., released Cooper’s notes to the special counsel, saying that the rule of law trumped Cooper’s own wishes and his promise to a source. Then on Wednesday morning, moments before the court was to come to order, Cooper said his source contacted him. “A short time ago, in somewhat dramatic fashion, I received expressed personal consent from my source,” he told the court. He remained silent on the source’s identity, but agreed for the first time to answer Fitzgerald’s questions. (According to grand jury regulations, the content of Cooper’s testimony, including the identity of his source, will remain under seal until the grand jury completes its work. However, Cooper could conceivably write about his conversations with his source.) Though this is good news for Cooper, the implications for his profession are far less certain.

“I have not talked to a single reporter in the last five days who is not completely freaked out by this,” said Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. The reason has little to do with Miller or Cooper or the spy “administration officials” revealed to the public. Fitzgerald’s investigation has targeted something far larger. He has attacked one of the core premises of a free press, the idea that journalists can assure sources who speak on condition of anonymity that they will not betray them. “Journalists are not entitled to promise complete confidentiality,” Fitzgerald asserted in a court filing Tuesday. “No one in America is.”

On Wednesday, Fitzgerald sounded defensive at times. Dressed in a pea green suit, he said, “Whatever people might want to think of me, this is not an individual effort. It is a team effort.” But the legal reasoning his team has relied on has held up well on appeal. It depends on a 1972 Supreme Court decision in a case called Branzburg vs. Hayes, which an attorney for Miller compared to the notorious Dred Scott decision that justified slavery. Paul Branzburg, a 28-year-old reporter, had refused a grand jury subpoena to disclose his sources for a story about hippie culture called “The Hash They Make Isn’t to Eat.” The highest court in the land eventually split 5 to 4, ruling against Branzburg. The court rejected his claim that the First Amendment protects a journalist’s sources.

But the split ruling did not settle the issue. In the years that followed, 31 states, and the District of Columbia, passed shield laws to protect journalists when they keep their vows of confidentiality. (Three proposals for a federal shield law are now winding their way through Congress, though they come too late to help Miller.) In the wake of the Pentagon Papers and Watergate, there was good reason for optimism. The courts largely steered clear of reporters’ notebooks, and journalism schools trained their students to prepare for a type of martyrdom that would probably never come.

Now the times have changed again. Watergate is a distant memory, and the press has become everyone’s punching bag — a recent Annenberg poll found that as many Americans consider Rush Limbaugh a journalist as Bob Woodward. In recent years, reporters’ confidential notes have been subpoenaed in a half-dozen cases, including lawsuits and investigations tied to Wen Ho Lee, anthrax “person of interest” Steven Hatfill, and even steroid use in baseball. Most journalists have risen to the challenge, facing down prison for their profession. But then Pearlstine decided that the rule of law was more important that the desires of his own reporter, or the traditions of the profession.

Before the courtroom opened, New York Times reporter Adam Liptak stood in the hallway, reminiscing on the days when all journalists knew they could never reveal a confidential source. “Until recently,” he said, “that was everyone’s understanding of the deal.”

Pearlstine’s decision, however, may have changed the equation. In his filings, Fitzgerald seemed to revel in the fact that not all journalists hold the same principles. “A number of journalists, first amendment scholars and opinion leaders flatly disagree with the position Miller is taking,” he wrote in one filing, an idea that was later echoed by Judge Hogan. James Goodale, a former First Amendment attorney for the New York Times, says such disagreements can be fatal in court. “If the courts believe that there isn’t substantial unanimity on this position then it doesn’t give the same credibility to the argument.”

Outside the courthouse, Bill Keller, the silver-haired editor of the New York Times, seemed to have a similar disdain for Pearlstine’s decision. “I think it was wrong,” he said. “I can’t discern what effect it had on the judge.” But he did add that the release of Cooper’s notes might have encouraged Cooper’s source to come forward, effectively giving Cooper a “get out of jail free card.” Someone asked Keller whether he thought it was more justified for Miller to go to jail, considering that her source was not a whistle-blower, but someone who sought to reveal the identity of a CIA operative for political gain. The editor answered on principle. “To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld,” he said, “you go to court with the case you’ve got.”

By early Wednesday afternoon, Chelsea Piers had scaled back from 50 makeshift operating theaters to 19, said Peter Abraham, a medic who was working at the scene.

At St. Vincent’s Manhattan Hospital, which received the brunt of the initial wave of the injured from the disaster, only six firefighters were admitted in the afternoon, putting the total number of patients at 449, said Mark Ackermann, the hospital’s senior vice president.

An additional 700 families had come to the hospital looking for missing relatives who were not there. “I’m told that is just the tip of the iceberg,” Ackermann said. Thursday morning, New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani said that the official count of missing people was 4,763.

Even with the influx of mourners, the clergy at St. Vincent’s said they were inundated with pastoral volunteers. The hospital sent away at least 25 as soon as they arrived.

Diane Bonner, a chaplain at St. Vincent’s, told the volunteers they could do more in their own neighborhoods and sanctuaries.

“You’ll need to stand on the corners in front of your churches,” Bonner told two Spanish-speaking sisters and a priest. “Not even that. You’ll turn the corner and there will be a need. This has not begun to hit. We don’t need people here. I wish we did.”

The Rev. James O’Connell, a chaplain at the hospital, arrived to work an hour and a half early, not only to help, but to take his mind off his own despair.

“Home is not going to be much better,” O’Connell said near the end of his shift. “The pain is just not going to go away.”

O’Connell and other members of the Catholic priesthood were mourning one of their own. Mychal Judge, a fellow Franciscan priest who served the New York Fire Department for about 20 years, died administering last rites when the second of the twin towers collapsed, O’Connell said.

Outside the hospital, families gathered around television cameras, hoping to get pictures of their missing relatives on the air. They posted fliers on police barricades with names, vital statistics and messages like “Missing: One World Trade Center, 100th Floor.”

At one point, a police officer named Sam Esposito emerged from St. Vincent’s dressed only in a hospital gown, his arm and leg in fresh casts. Esposito, who worked in Brooklyn, said he had been off duty in lower Manhattan when he heard the explosion. Minutes later, he found himself searching the damaged floors of the north Trade Center tower.

“When the first building fell, we did not think that the second building was going to fall,” he said. He remembered clearing five people out of their offices and checking the building’s day-care center to make sure it was empty.

Though he narrowly escaped the building’s collapse, he said one emotion overwhelmed him still: “You feel helpless. You feel like you want to lend a hand, but you can’t lend a hand.”

Elsewhere in the West Village, thousands gathered on the sidewalks to do what little they could, cheering police and fire vehicles, dump trucks and bulldozers as they made their way to the smoldering downtown. Some held wooden signs, with messages like “NY’s Heroes,” “Be Safe,” and “Our Finest Hour.”

Back at the Chelsea Piers, organizers turned away volunteers with megaphones, saying only that “Tylenol, ice, towels and T-shirts” were needed for the rescue workers. New Yorkers brought much more, dropping off boxes of Band-Aids, bottled water and a milk crate filled with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

Jared Weinstein, 27, one of the few to find a place among the volunteers, came all the way from Brooklyn to lend a hand. “I couldn’t sit in front of my television all day,” he said as he helped sort donations. “Nor could I feel fulfilled enough by just giving blood.”