Senator Pat Leahy threatened to pursue pursue contempt charges against the White House when Congress reconvenes next month over their response subpoenas for internal White House documents on the NSA’s domestic surveillance program.

“Time is up,” said Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. “We’ve waited long enough.”

Mr. Leahy’s comments ratcheted up the battle between Congressional Democrats and the White House over access to secret documents on the legal underpinnings of the eavesdropping program, which authorized the N.S.A. to listen in without a court warrant on Americans’ international communications.

It’s been about two months since the Senate “voted to subpoena the White House and the Bush administration for access to the documents as part of its investigation into the program.”

The White House, in a letter to Mr. Leahy on Monday, said it had identified a number of classified documents that appeared to fall under the subpoena but it said the documents could be covered by a claim of executive privilege. The White House asked for more time to research the issue.

“It remains our goal to avoid a conflict between the branches on this important issue of national security,” the White House counsel, Fred F. Fielding, said in the letter.

But Mr. Leahy made clear that his patience was running out. With Congress on its August break, he returned to Washington and held a news conference announcing that the White House had failed to meet the Monday deadline he had set for complying with the subpoena.

“Follow the law, and don’t act like you’re above the law,” Mr. Leahy told reporters in remarks aimed at the White House. “Go ahead and answer the subpoena.”

Mr. Leahy said that when the Senate returns to session next month, he would bring up what he called the White House’s “dilatory unresponsiveness” with the Judiciary Committee in order to decide whether to bring contempt charges against the administration. “I prefer cooperation to contempt, but right now, there’s no question they’re in contempt of a valid order of the Congress,” Mr. Leahy said.

Still there is a process if Leahy goes this route:

The Judiciary Committee would first have to approve such a measure. It would then go to the full Senate, where — under complex rules — Democrats would have to lure some Republicans to break a possible filibuster. If a contempt charge were approved by the full Senate, it would then most likely be referred to the United States attorney’s office in the District of Columbia for possible criminal proceedings.

The road to contempt charges is legally and politically perilous, however. Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the leading Republican on the Judiciary Committee, has favored trying to negotiate an agreement with the White House rather than risk having the matter tied up in the courts through the end of the Bush administration.

It’s time to go forward with this. The White House will continue to stonewall and as the WaPo has reported, Cheney’s office has “acknowledged for the first time yesterday that it has dozens of documents related to the administration’s warrantless surveillance program, but it signaled that it will resist efforts by congressional Democrats to obtain them.”

No more stonewalling.

Enough Is Enough.

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