Fearful Dems play politics of cowardice

By Libby
Updated below

I haven't been able to find the words today to express my disappointment and disgust with the Democrat's cave-in to Bush's bullyism. I'm speaking of course of the House's meekly following in the Senate's footsteps and legalizing the illegal White House domestic surveillance program.

Balkinization put it well.

The passage of the new FISA bill by the Senate and now the House demonstrates that the Democrats stand neither for defending civil liberties nor for checking executive power.

They stand for nothing at all.

So did the Xsociate.

The only thing worse than a Congress that rubberstamps because of loyalty to party is one that rubberstamps out of fear.

And fear what is what this was about. Pure political cowardice on the parts of the Dems in the face of the relentless hubris of the president. Oh, they tried to put a pretty face on it.

The Senate bill was needed, aides said, because of restrictions recently imposed by the FISA court on the ability of spy agencies to intercept communications.

What part of illegal do the Dems not understand? If a court won't write off on these expanded powers, in a secret decision we wouldn't even known about if Boehner hadn't spilled the beans, what makes the Democrats think they should underwrite it?

One Democratic traitor to civil liberties justifies her vote by saying the intelligence community is concerned about increased chatter on terrorist networks.

"I am concerned as well," Feinstein said. "We are living in a period of heightened vulnerability and must give the intelligence community the tools they need."

They've been saying that periodically for five years. This is the same intelligence community that allowed our president to lie to us about WMDs despite their own doubts. So she thinks we can believe them now -- why?

Stupid and gutless. There was no reason to cave in on this except of fear of political risk (and protect their vacation plans). God forbid that this time there really is an attack, they don't want to be blamed by the GOP. Idiots. They're going to be blamed anyway. For everything that went wrong in this adminstration. That's just the GOP's style and they have guilt transference down to an art.

In the end Larisa Alexandrovna best sums up what's so very wrong and in fact dangerous about this spineless passing of a bad bill.

Make NO mistake, we are in serious peril when an Attorney General who has subverted the Constitution per request of his boss, lied, obstructed justice, and defended torture, is now in full authority to declare who is going to be a target of warrant-less surveillance. You may not see this as seriously as I do, but then again, you have not lived under a dictatorship to know the difference. Mostly though, the people who failed most, are the citizens of this country - who should have taken to the streets and shut down all commerce, all traffic, and disengaged from the machine of government. You did not shut it down. You did not even try. You waited as your hopes were put entirely in the hands of cowards.

Anybody who thinks the White House is going to sit by for the next six months and will not abuse this carte blanche to spy on Americans, is not facing reality. As Larissa says, with this we have officially become a police state. Bush doesn't even need the jackboots to enforce his will when he can cow the Congress with an idle threat into giving him everything he wants.

Update: Orin Kerr at Volokh analyzes the decision. Short version: Well yeah, I kind of tepidly support it if they really only use it to target foreign calls and because it's temporary, even though it appears that the authorization lasts a year even though they say it sunsets in six months. Otherwise it's a civil liberties disaster.

What I get out Orin's post is there's a comically weak review system of oversight, that he thinks the court will somehow apply more strictly than the the broad language would indicate. They pretty much have an open season on eavesdropping, which may not survive a Fourth Amendment challenge -- assuming you want to wait four years or so for it to wind its way through the judicial process -- but otherwise there's no real statutory protection of privacy. They don't need a warrant to spy on you.

And the best part is the telcoms'participation is mandatory so they can't be sued for complying but neither can they, as an act of conscience, refuse to comply. That's good news for the big telcos that have already dumped tons of data into the government's lap. For those few companies that answered to a higher ethical and constitutional standard, not so much.

Larissa is still right. We've just turned the corner into the police state. If you can't imagine what Bush and Cheney might do with unfettered power to spy on Americans. Well -- I can, and it's not a comforting thought.