President George W. Bush penciled in two emergency speeches at the last minute into his usually relaxed weekend schedule and Vice President Dick Cheney paid his first visit in office to Iraq on a lightning, super-secret nine hour trip.

Cheney's visit to Baghdad where he met with senior Iraqi political leaders and top U.S. military commanders was probably scheduled well in advance. But the president's two speeches -- the first delivered as a radio address, but with television cameras also present Saturday, and the second to be nationally broadcast on the TV networks Sunday evening -- certainly were not.

They came after a week that had been carefully choreographed to be a series of political triumphs and powerful offensive speeches and statements from Bush and his administration on Iraq policy.

Instead, the week ended with administration policymaking in chaotic disarray and the Republican majority in the House and Senate more estranged from the president on many different aspects of national security policy than it has ever been before in his almost five years in office.

On Friday, the White House received its second stinging rebuke of the week at the hands of Congress. Two days earlier, more than 100 members of the Republican majority in the House of Representatives had voted with the Democrats on a non-binding but hot-button motion to support Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.'s Senate legislation to outlaw the use of torture. The resolution sailed though the House by 308 votes to only 122.

Then on Friday, the other, far heavier, shoe dropped in the Upper House: The Senate after a fractious bitter debate gave the president an insufficient majority to push ahead with ratification of the renewal of the highly controversial USA Patriot Act.

Several Republican senators openly gave as the reason for their refusal to go along with such a top level administration legislative priority their anger and unease over the revelations earlier that day that the president after Sept. 11, 2001 had authorized a major electronic eavesdropping operation by the National Security Agency on hundreds, possibly thousands, of U.S. citizens without any legislative or court authority to do so.

The administration wanted the Senate to act before the end of the year to approve legislation renewing key parts of the Patriot Act, originally passed only a few days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. But the Republican majority in the Senate was able to muster only 52 votes to 47 to end debate, well short of the 60 votes needed to force an immediate vote on the legislation.

As a result the Patriot Act will remain in limbo for the time being. This outcome was a clear victory for Democratic opponents of the renewed legislation who charged that it threatened civil liberties. A dozen or so key provisions of the law expire Dec. 31. unless they are renewed by Congress before then.

The president reacted fast and scrambled hard to respond to the Patriot vote loss and the domestic spying revelations, but not fast enough to hide from the public clear indications of more U-turns in policy and political tactics at the last moment that in the eyes of many smacked of desperation.

On Friday, after the revelations broke in a New York Times story immediately confirmed and followed up by the Washington Post, the president, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and other top officials declined to confirm them.

However, less than 24 hours later, the president, in an highly unusual Saturday radio speech broadcast from the White House, reversed course

Bush admitted that after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 he had ordered the super-secret National Security Agency to launch a program of covert electronic surveillance within the United States even though there was no legal foundation or authorization for it.

The president also attempted a counter-attack on both Republican and Democratic senators who only the day before had voted to block reauthorization of the Patriot Act.

"In the war on terror, we cannot afford to be without this law for a single moment," he said. "That decision is irresponsible and endangers the lives of our citizens... In the war on terror we cannot afford to be without this law for a single moment."

It remains to be seen whether the president will succeed in rallying key elements of public opinion behind him, as he has so often before. But the omens do not look good for him. For the spying revelations and ensuing uproar have already eclipsed the major speech on Iraq policy he delivered on Wednesday and the Iraqi parliamentary elections Thursday that he had counted on to present as a major triumph to the American public.

Only last week, it all looked very different. The president's Republican majority in the House and around 20 Democrats, as expected, voted to approve an amended version of the Patriot Act by 251 votes to 174.

But the atmosphere on Capitol Hill this week was dramatically different.

Bush lost the support of more than 100 congressmen in the House vote on Wednesday -- an unprecedented humiliation for him. And even Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, broke with him on the Patriot Act.

At the same time, the domestic spying revelations reenergized critics from the Democratic Party mainstream.

"In secretly authorizing the National Security Agency to wiretap the phones of American citizens, President (George W.) Bush has demonstrated his utter contempt for the laws that have guided presidents before in times of great national peril," Morton H. Halperin, senior vice president of the Center for American Progress and a director of U.S. advocacy for the Open Society Institute, said Friday.

Halperin, who was director of policy planning at the State Department under President Bill Clinton, claimed Bush's actions were clearly illegal.

"The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act governs surveillance for intelligence purposes in the United States and expressly prohibits surveillance not authorized by law," he said. "At no time during Congress' consideration of the broad anti-terrorism authorities contained in the Patriot Act ... has the president requested this new authority for the NSA. We now are faced with the fact that the president's secret and unlawful grant of power to the NSA makes the current debate on the Patriot Act almost irrelevant.

"The law and Constitution are clear," Halperin said. "The National Security Agency does not have this authority and the president cannot grant it to them with the stroke of his pen."

Halperin's comments clearly delineated the line congressional Democrats will take on the domestic spying controversy in the coming weeks. Ironically, had the story broken in the months after Sept. 11, 2001, the president might have been able to shrug it off easily.

There was then -- and there still is now -- a broad consensus across the nation that the U.S. security services and intelligence agencies need to be given the legal powers they need to prevent attacks like Sept. 11, 2001, or even worse ones, ever happening again.

Despite the worsening situation in Iraq, in the four years since Sept. 11, 2001, the president has continued to enjoy the trust of a clear majority of the American people -- and of all Republicans and even many Democrats in Congress -- who believed he could be relied upon not to abuse these extraordinary powers.

But now, the revelation that Bush unilaterally assumed and exercised additional domestic surveillance powers without getting any legal or congressional approval first, has dealt a massive blow to that foundation of trust.

The fact that the president moved so fast to schedule Saturday and Sunday's speeches showed that he understood the gravity of the political crisis he faced very clearly. Bush has always had a political intellect of the highest order: But it remains to be seen if that will be sufficient to restore the national credibility and trust he lost on Friday.