The Senate bowed to White House pressure last night and passed a Republican plan for overhauling the federal government's terrorist surveillance laws, approving changes that would temporarily give U.S. spy agencies expanded power to eavesdrop on foreign suspects without a court order.
The 60 to 28 vote, which was quickly denounced by civil rights and privacy advocates, came after Democrats in the House failed to win support for more modest changes that would have required closer court supervision of government surveillance. Earlier in the day, President Bush threatened to hold Congress in session into its scheduled summer recess if it did not approve the changes he wanted.
The legislation, which is expected to go before the House today, would expand the government's authority to intercept without a court order the phone calls and e-mails of people in the United States who are communicating with people overseas.
As currently written, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act already gives U.S. spies broad leeway to monitor the communications of foreign terrorism suspects, but the 30-year-old statute requires a warrant to monitor calls intercepted in the United States, regardless of where the calls begin or end.
The caption below the photograph of Bush accompanying the WaPo piece quotes the president:
President Bush said he opposes a congressional recess, scheduled to begin this weekend, unless lawmakers approve "a bill I can sign."
We all need to stop for a moment and let the full sense of those words sink in. In our system, Congress submits legislation to the president and, if the president approves, he signs it; if he disapproves, he vetoes it. George W. Bush doesn't want to do that -- he thinks he lives in a different country: one in which the president orders legislation to his specifications, and Congress prepares that legislation to his specifications. In George W. Bush's country, the bill-passing procedure is not set up as it is in order to serve as a check on the president's power; it exists to reinforce the president's power and carry out his will.
However, this president does not have the power to usurp Congress's authority unless Congress gives him that power. This president does not have the power to subvert the U.S. Constitution and spit on the graves of the men who wrote the Constitution unless Congress allows him to have it.
If you don't know what the "expand" in "Senate Votes To Expand Warrantless Surveillance" means, the WaPo explains:
Privacy advocates accused the Democrats of selling out and charged that this bill gives the government more authority than it had under a controversial warrantless wiretapping program begun in secret after the 2001 terrorist attacks. Under that program, the government could conduct surveillance without judicial oversight only if it had a reason to believe that one party to the call was a member of or affiliated with al-Qaeda or a related terrorist organization. This bill drops that condition, they noted.
[...]
Gregory Nojeim, senior counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology, predicted that the bill's approval would lead to the monitoring of ordinary Americans by the National Security Agency, which conducts most of the government's electronic surveillance. "If this bill becomes law, Americans who communicate with a person abroad can count on one thing: The NSA may be listening," he said.
That's okay with Senate Democrats. As long as they can open up the summer house as scheduled.
