President Bush and his allies have tried to squelch criticisms of his domestic spying program by suggesting that it is virtually unpatriotic to question the program's legality. But Bush's domestic spying program appears to be splitting some right-wing conservative activities and GOP lawmakers, according to news reports.

At a recent Senate Judiciary hearing on the domestic spying program, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales was grilled by several Republican members of the committee who joined Democrats in questioning the legality of the Administration's actions.

"There are a lot of people who think you're wrong," the committee chairman, Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), told Gonzales. Specter asked why surveillance requests were not taken to the FISA court "as matter of public confidence."

When Gonzales argued that the Constitution gives the president undisputable powers to conduct warrantless surveillance despite a statute aimed at requiring him to seek court approval, such an interpretation "is not sound," Specter later told the news media, ". . . He's smoking Dutch Cleanser."

Some of the spying program's sharpest critics have been libertarian groups, such as the conservative Cato Institute.

"The overriding issue that's at stake in these hearings is the stance of the administration that they're going to decide in secrecy which laws they're going to follow and which laws they can bypass," said Timothy Lynch, director of Cato's project on criminal justice. Conservative Web sites and blogs appear to be "fairly evenly divided" on the spying program, he said.

Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) joined Specter in challenging Gonzales's assertion that Congress implicitly approved the surveillance tactics when it voted to authorize military force in combating terrorism shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Democrats making similar arguments, however, have fallen under scathing attacks over their patriotism from some GOP lawmakers and the Bush Administration.