Mou oshimai da
by digby
Republican leaders said Monday that they had reached a tentative agreement to garner political support for legislation on domestic surveillance, in part by sidestepping the question of whether the president has the constitutional authority to order wiretapping without a court order.
There was wide disagreement about the plan’s impact. Supporters billed the most recent version as a way of requiring a court order for most domestic wiretaps. But civil rights advocates and even some administration officials suggested that it would maintain the status quo in allowing the continuation of wiretapping without warrants under a program approved by President Bush.
Senator Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican who leads the Judiciary Committee, said that in recent negotiations, the White House had agreed to delete language from his bill that critics said would have implicitly acknowledged the president’s constitutional authority to order wiretapping without a warrant.
Three Republican senators — Larry E. Craig of Idaho, John E. Sununu of New Hampshire and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska — had raised concerns about this and other aspects of the Specter bill, which would submit the wiretapping program to a secret court to rule on its constitutionality. With the changes, they said they could support the legislation, and Mr. Specter predicted he would have enough Senate votes to gain passage.
[…]
Some lawmakers and civil rights advocates said they believed that the three senators had mischaracterized or misinterpreted what they had agreed to and that the White House was retaining the right to order wiretaps without a warrant.
The administration declined to say when it would choose to seek warrants under the new plan.
The program approved by Mr. Bush “does allow for the interception without court order of international communications where one end is within the United States, and this agreement would provide this authority and would establish a process for moving to individualized court orders with respect to individuals within the United States,” said Brian Roehrkasse, a Justice Department spokesman. He declined to elaborate.
Some opponents of the wiretapping program said they saw the new plan as a step backward because of technical language that would narrow the definition of what constitutes “electronic surveillance” that requires a court order and would effectively make warrants optional.
“This is a major setback for the Fourth Amendment and civil liberties,” said Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Securities Studies.
As Norman Ornstein said about the torture cave-in: “It sure doesn’t look to me as if they stood up and did anything other than bare their teeth for some ceremonial barking, before giving the president a whole lot of leeway. I find it really troubling.”
Yes, it is “troubling” to see three more brave Republican defenders of civil liberties (and Arlen Specter) pretend to be standing up for truth and the American way make yet another one of those last minute “deals” with the president that legalizes every heinous thing he’s done and giving him explicit congressional authority to keep doing it.
I hear the Senate is planning to put the combined the torture and spying bill that Mitch McConnell introduced last Friday to the vote. It’s much more efficient to destroy the constitution with one big bill they can hold over Democrats’ heads like a samurai sword if they fail to vote for it. Very clever.
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