FISA passed, but there's NO immunity for Telecoms.
Astonishingly, the Democrats have not caved in under Republican pressure and a new FISA bill has just been passed which does not grant immunity to the Telecoms.
As Glenn Greenwald notes:One Democrat after the next -- of all stripes -- delivered impassioned, defiant speeches in defense of the rule of law, oversight on presidential eavesdropping, and safeguards on government spying. They swatted away the GOP's fear-mongering claims with the dismissive contempt such tactics deserve, rejecting the principle that has predominated political debate in this country since 9/11: that the threat of the Terrorists means we must live under the rule of an omnipotent President and a dismantled constitutional framework.
It is, of course, true that this bill will have a hard time passing the Senate (though if even most House Blue Dogs were persuaded to support this bill, why can't most Democratic Senators who previously voted for the Rockefeller bill be persuaded?). It's also true that even if it did pass the Senate, the President will veto it, and there won't be enough votes to override the veto. So this bill won't become law, but that doesn't matter.
The reality is that the best possible outcome here is nothing -- we lived quite well for 30 years under FISA and if no new bill is passed, we will continue to live under FISA. FISA grants extremely broad eavesdropping powers to the President and the FISA court virtually never interferes with any eavesdropping activities. And the only "fix" to FISA that is even arguably necessary -- allowing eavesdropping on foreign-to-foreign calls without warrants -- has the support of virtually everyone in Congress and could be easily passed as a stand-alone measure.
At last the Democrats can claim a victory over the Bush fear mongers. And, at last, the Democrats are using Congress to do the very thing that they were elected to do. Oppose Bush and stop him. So, despite all the hot air that Bush supporters have been blowing for the past few months, FISA is once again established as "the exclusive authority" for collecting intelligence within the United States.
So there we have it, FISA re-established in it's rightful place and no immunity for the lawbreakers. Excellent.
2 comments:
I hate to break it to you, but FISA has not "been passed" as you say. The Democrats in the House passed a bill that then has to go to the Senate, and if passed in the Senate, it would then go to the President. That's how the US government works. However, as the House Democrats are fully aware, the chances of their bill even making it out of the Senate are slim-to-none. The Senate passed their own bipartisan bill that the Democrat House leadership wouldn't even submit to a floor vote because they knew it would pass on a bipartisan basis.
So as everybody who follows the issue is aware, and counter to what you are claiming, there has in fact been no movement on an updated FISA, nor is there likely to be for some time.
Maybe your reading skills are getting worse. You might want to read again the Glenn Greenwald section that I highlighted, in particular the second paragraph.
You're not telling me anything that I don't know.
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