Bill Of Rights OK’d For Destruction By Independence Day

by dday

There’s not a lot more that can be said about this FISA abomination, but you may want to keep up with developments, so here’s the latest.

House and Senate leaders of both parties said negotiators were near a deal on extending the authority to track terror suspects overseas while protecting the civil liberties of Americans as spy agencies sift through cell phone calls and other electronic communications that did not exist when the surveillance law first came into being.

Senior Congressional officials said they hoped to seal an agreement early this week and quickly vote in the House and Senate on legislation that expired back in February, though the administration retained the authority to continue spying on terror suspects it already had in its sights. That power begins slipping later this summer.

Well, actually, no. The “power” would revert back to the FISA court, which has only rejected past warrants for surveillance on the technical grounds that the foreign communications go through a domestic switcher, and all that really would need to be done is a patch treating those calls as foreign communications. Off of that molehill is where we are building this mountain of crap.

The main sticking point between the House and Senate has been President Bush’s demand that phone companies that cooperated in the wiretapping program after the Sept. 11 attacks be given blanket immunity from legal action by customers who claim their rights were violated by warrantless surveillance. The Senate went along with the plan but the House balked.

After weeks of talks, lawmakers have worked out a deal that would allow federal courts to settle the question of whether the telecommunications companies should be protected because they were assured their participation was legal.

No, they’re not going to allow federal courts to “settle the question.” They’re asking courts to rule on whether the Attorney General gave telecom companies a “Violate the 4th Amendment” permission slip. By confining the matter to one of paperwork, district courts will not be ruling on the legality of the spying but merely confirming that the executive branch said it was OK to spy. This is a pretext for a completely outraegous circumstance – the executive branch breaking the law, and then legalizing it by showing that they wrote down that they could break the law.

This, along with blank check funding for war into the next President’s term, is being given a deadline date by the House leadership, which always works out perfectly.

Lawmakers also have to get more serious this week about finishing up an overdue bill to fund combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The measure has been slowed by fights over an extension of unemployment pay, new veterans education benefits and general Democratic opposition to Bush administration war policy.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she wants the matter settled before Congress breaks for Independence Day at the end of next week, suggesting she is ready to bring the issue to a head.

“We want to pass a bill that will be signed by the president,” she said. “And that will happen before we leave for the Fourth of July. So the timing is sometime between now and then. I feel confident that that will happen.”

There’s even talk that the FISA bill and the war funding bill will be COMBINED. Which would certainly wrap up the craven nature of the action into a nice, neat bow, so there’s at least something to be said for it. The fact that the deadline is the date marking the birth of the nation gives it a little layer of irony.

CQ has a little more, noting that the compromise, which involves allowing district courts to decide the fate of immunity, was worked out WITHOUT the heads of the Judiciary Committees, or any of the party leadership on either side. This is Steny Hoyer and Jello Jay Rockefeller’s ballgame. CQ seems to think that this deal is not yet hardened in stone, but I’m not as sanguine. We need to fight this nonsense, of course, but more than anything this legislation is a slap in the face to those who have prolonged this debate until they are satisfied with the civil liberties and privacy protections. You get the feeling that Hoyer wants to say to the caucus “Can’t you let me finish off the Fourth Amendment and go away so we can move on to important items like naming more post offices? I made it LOOK like both sides will get their day in court, what more would you have me do?”

I’ve previously called for Sen. Obama to step in and put a stop to this nonsense, telling the Hoyer-Rockefeller axis that this undermines his own security goals and debases our ideals as a nation. If he doesn’t there really isn’t much hope of getting this halted. You can contact him at his Senate website, or at his campaign site.

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