FISA Telecom Immunity: A Democratic Failure

Let’s be clear, the claims that this recent FISA bill provides anything other than immunity for past lawbreaking are utterly false.  Democratic spokesmen and the usual press stenographers are trying to inflate a near-unless procedural provision into a substantive guarantee of accountability. Greenwald explains:

The judge has only one role: dismiss the lawsuits as long as the Attorney General — Bush’s Attorney General — claims that the spying was “designed to prevent or detect a terrorist attack.” The court is barred from examining whether that’s true or whether there is evidence to support that claim. It’s totally irrelevant whether the Judge is favorable to “civil libertarians’ claims” or not since he’s required to dismiss the lawsuits the minute the Attorney General utters the magic words, and he’s prohibited from inquiring as to whether the Attorney General’s statements about the purpose of the spying are true.

All it requires is an undocumented assertion by an Attorney General in the Bush Administration? This is what elected Democrats are trying to claim operates as a check? Apparently they *do* think the public is completely stupid.

Honestly, a good portion of the public *is* stupid. And that’s one of the reasons we have a representative republic and not direct democracy – so that our elected officials can exercise their best judgments within the constraints of the Constitution. But this lot of Democrats seem to have come to the same point as the current Administration – that the Constitution is merely an ignorable guideline, easily disposed of when it serves another purpose.

Hunter did a great job of summarizing why the Democrats’ action is so deplorable, and I urge you to read the whole thing.  But I’ll condense his three point explanation here:

1. It goes to the heart of illegal actions by this administration. The Bush administration has broken law after law, and been enmeshed in scandal after scandal, and been met with no substantive actions. [ . . . ] So to respond to a clearly illegal act by, of all possible things, writing legislation that offers retroactive immunity for those acts, maintains the secrecy of those acts, and declares that the Bush administration itself will be responsible for the future integrity of those acts — it is patently asinine.
2. It is a Constitutional question, and of a sort that the administration has fought long and hard to cripple. Among the more basic premises of the Bill of Rights is the notion of probable cause; your government may not conduct searches or seizures without a warrant, and the judicial branch shall judge the merit of those warrants. [ . . . ] It takes no imagination at all to observe that once one type of widespread, warrantless, causeless electronic search is deemed to be outside of 4th Amendment protections, an entire series of other electronic searches will follow.
3. It was easy. I mean, Jesus H. Christmas, it has been the easiest thing in the world — all they had to do was not do it. It’s not freakin’ rocket science — but thanks to the efforts of a number of Democrats, not just Rockefeller and Hoyer but people like Reid and Pelosi, they just couldn’t not put immunity in.  [ . . . ] It is baffling, and the only rationale available seems to be the most cynical one — it is merely doing the bidding of companies that provide substantive campaign contributions. No other explanation would seem to suffice.

This, as Hunter puts it, is indefensible.  Which leads me to one final point – I’m tired of my fellow  Democrats making excuses for these kinds of failures.  No one is suggesting that anyone should vote for Republicans over this, but every time someone says “Well, it’s an election year” or “I’m sure he knows things we don’t know and I trust his judgment”, they’re complicit in the dismantling of our Constitution.  And that is not only indefensible, but worthy of contempt.