This morning’s WaPo takes a very harsh look at the cowardice of the Democratic Party “leaders” and their refusal to support the Constitution.
THE DEMOCRATIC-led Congress, more concerned with protecting its political backside than with safeguarding the privacy of American citizens, left town early yesterday after caving in to administration demands that it allow warrantless surveillance of the phone calls and e-mails of American citizens, with scant judicial supervision and no reporting to Congress about how many communications are being intercepted. To call this legislation ill-considered is to give it too much credit: It was scarcely considered at all. Instead, it was strong-armed through both chambers by an administration that seized the opportunity to write its warrantless wiretapping program into law -- or, more precisely, to write it out from under any real legal restrictions.Administration officials, backed up by their Republican enablers in Congress, argued that they were being dangerously hamstrung in their ability to collect foreign-to-foreign communications by suspected terrorists that happen to transit through the United States. The problem is that while no serious person objects to intercepting foreign-to-foreign communications, what the administration sought -- and what it managed to obtain -- allows much more than foreign-to-foreign contacts. The government will now be free to intercept any communications believed to be from outside the United States (including from Americans overseas) that involve "foreign intelligence" -- not just terrorism. It will be able to monitor phone calls and e-mails of U.S. citizens or residents without warrants -- unless the subject is the "primary target" of the surveillance. Instead of having the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court ensure that surveillance is being done properly, with monitoring of Americans minimized, that job would be up to the attorney general and the director of national intelligence. The court's role is reduced to that of rubber stamp.
There’s much more. Fred Hiatt must be on vacation, otherwise we would have been presented with some pap about “Heimatschütz” – defense of the Homeland.
The Democrat’s disgraceful groveling before the tyrannical demands of a man-child shame all of us. To have given in to the equivocation of such a ridiculous claim, and to have actually legalized the crimes he has committed over the last 6 years has stained that party, and Congress, with a dishonor that is palpable.
We may possibly be allowed to hold elections next year, and it would be in our interests, from a point of self-defense, to find as many real Democrats as we can, as quickly as we can.
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http://www.mainandcentral.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/694
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