Telecom Immunity Is The Right Decision
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Barack, Bush, Congress, Democrats, Law, Legislation, Republicans, The War On TerrorismA lot of left wing blogs are hammering Steny Hoyer and Nancy Pelosi for reaching a compromise on the FISA legislation, but this is difficult bi-partisanship at work and it ultimately means getting to a better place than we previously were.
Ending a year-long battle with President Bush, the House approved, 293 to 129, a re-write of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that extends the government’s ability to eavesdrop on espionage and terrorism suspects while providing a legal escape hatch for AT&T, Verizon Communications and other telecommunication firms.The companies face more than 40 lawsuits that allege they violated customers’ privacy rights by helping the government conduct a warrantless spying program after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
A majority of House Democrats opposed the surveillance legislation. Some argued that the new law would lead to illegal surveillance of Americans, while others contended it was a principled compromise that provided greater civil liberties than a version favored earlier this year by the White House and Senate.
Again, the law before this was awful, and even though this legislation isn’t what many Dem interests would hope for, I think some consideration has to be given to the idea of getting to a less worse place. In other words, completely blocking this legislation would get in the way of providing more civil liberties.
You know, like making sure the government actually uses the FISA court…
The legislation also would require court approval of procedures for intercepting telephone calls and e-mails that pass through U.S.-based servers — another step that the White House and GOP lawmakers previously resisted.
If Dems want to revisit this after the 2008 elections they can, but for now it’s a compromise I’m glad they made.
UPDATE:
It’s encouraging to see that Obama supports this compromise too.
June 20th, 2008 at 10:01 pm
Politikal cowardice plain and simple.
The democrats folded like a cheap paper suit
infront of the Ken Lay Enron Telecom Bill.
Why are the Democrats not suing the pants
off of Ken Lay and the Enron telecon bill?
They’re all lawyers ain’t they?
Their all cowards to in face of the big corporates.
You disgust me
in your wealseness.
June 21st, 2008 at 1:02 am
[...] As I said in my previous post, I think this bill is a good compromise and anybody who votes for Obama should start getting used to this kind of legislation. Obviously it won’t be pretty, but it represents a better reality than the previous law and if anybody hopes to repair the damage brought on by the Bush administration, they better expect some scar tissue in the interim. This entry was posted on Saturday, June 21st, 2008 and is filed under 2008 Election, Barack, Law, Legislation, The War On Terrorism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. [...]
June 23rd, 2008 at 11:43 pm
I fail to see any good in this. We already have adequate FISA laws. This is cover for Bush, and protection for politician’s “clientele.” Obama should be (and hopefully is) ashamed to take part in this charade. If the blogger can tell me anything we, the citizenry, actually gain I’d like to hear it.
June 24th, 2008 at 2:37 pm
[...] supporters who were so critical of the Clinton ad (JG), but now give Obama a free pass (JG) on a FISA flip flop that invokes the same fears, but with far more serious and long lasting implications for the rule [...]