The United States Senate will drive anther nail into the coffin of American democracy today when it votes to approve the RESTORE Act which among other evils, rewards ATT, Verizon, and (possibly) others. We don’t know for sure, because the Bu$h malAdministration doesn’t want us to know just how many millions of Americans are having their phone calls and emails snooped into.

Here’s the WaPo this morning:

Senate Democrats and Republicans reached agreement with the Bush administration yesterday on the terms of new legislation to control the federal government's domestic surveillance program, which includes a highly controversial grant of legal immunity to telecommunications companies that have assisted the program, according to congressional sources.

Disclosure of the deal followed a decision by House Democratic leaders to pull a competing version of the measure from the floor because they lacked the votes to prevail over Republican opponents and GOP parliamentary maneuvers.

It’s all bullshit of course, because the cowardly Democrats say they’re afraid of being called “traitors” by the Republicans.

They’re just not afraid of the voters and taxpayers calling them “traitors”.

Yet.

The collapse marked the first time since Democrats took control of the chamber that a major bill was withdrawn from consideration before a scheduled vote. It was a victory for President Bush, whose aides lobbied heavily against the Democrats' bill, and an embarrassment for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who had pushed for the measure's passage.

Fuck Nancy Pelosi. She had her chance to fight but she has no spine, and no desire to be respected by decent people. She is now officially irrelevant.

By the way, here’s the man who actually knelt down in homage before George Bu$h and begged him to destroy the rest of the Constitution.

I hope Jay Rockefeller is proud of having given George Bu$h the right to listen in on your 16 year old daughter’s phone conversations with no oversight or control.

We were going to officially lose the right of privacy, no matter what. But they had to piss in our faces, too. They’re going to make the Constitutional violations of ATT, Verizon, and who knows what other telephone companies legal by special provision.

Here’s Glenn Greenwald:

Let's just describe very factually and dispassionately what has happened here. Congress -- led by Senators, such as Jay Rockefeller, who have received huge payments from the telecom industry, and by privatized intelligence pioneer Mike McConnell, former Chairman of the secretive intelligence industry association that has been demanding telecom amnesty -- is going to intervene directly in the pending lawsuits against AT&T and other telecoms and declare them the winners on the ground that they did nothing wrong. Because of their vast ties to the telecoms, neither Rockefeller nor McConnell could ever appropriately serve as an actual judge in those lawsuits.

Yet here they are, meeting and reviewing secret documents and deciding amongst themselves to end all pending lawsuits in favor of their benefactors -- AT&T, Verizon and others. Let me quote again from that 1998 Foreign Affairs essay by Thomas Carothers helpfully outlining the steps required to install the "rule of law" in third-world, pre-democracy countries:

Type three reforms aim at the deeper goal of increasing government's compliance with law. A key step is achieving genuine judicial independence. . . . But the most crucial changes lie elsewhere. Above all, government officials must refrain from interfering with judicial decision-making and accept the judiciary as an independent authority.

I hope you paid attention to the emboldened phrase above. Jay Rockefeller has taken a bribe - gone in the tank via "campaign donations" – in order to stop lawsuits against the telephone companies. We are now officially a banana republic.

In fact, he’s fixing the case, since ATT has already lost part of one case.

[R]ead what Bush-41-appointed Federal Judge Vaughn Walker -- operating out in the open, in an actual court of law, with both sides present and in accordance with due process -- ruled when rejecting AT&T's argument that they are entitled to have the case dismissed because they operated in "good faith" [Decision (.pdf) at p. 68]:

So AT&T and other telecoms went to Washington and -- led by Bush 41 Attorney General (and now Verizon General Counsel) William Barr, and in cooperation with their former colleague, Mike McConnell -- began paying former government officials such as Dan Coats and Jamie Gorelick to convince political officials to whom they give money, such as Jay Rockefeller, to pass a law declaring them the victors in these lawsuits and be relieved of all liability -- all based on assertions that a court of law has already rejected. They are literally buying a judicial victory in Congress -- just like Carothers warned that third-world countries must avoid if they want to become functioning democracies under the "rule of law" ("Above all, government officials must refrain from interfering with judicial decision-making").

Once again the Democratic Party has shamed me.

There is a hope. Senator Chris Dodd has stated he will fight this evil bill:

right to privacy of thousands of law-abiding Americans, I want to assure him it is not a value we have in common and I hope the same can be said of my fellow Democrats in the Senate.

"For too long we have failed to respect the rule of law and failed to protect our fundamental civil liberties. I will do what I can to see to it that no telecommunications giant that was complicit in this Administration's assault on the Constitution is given a get-out-of-jail-free card."

A slim hope for America, but he is running for the Presidency, right? This could be a major feather in his cap. He’d get my vote.