Democrats Cave Again

Update: Chris Dodd has placed a hold on the controversial FISA bill that grants the telecommunications companies immunity. Go sign the Petition. This is great. Senator Dodd really stands for what he believes. We need more of this. This is what he said:

The Military Commissions Act. Warrantless wiretapping. Shredding of Habeas Corpus. Torture. Extraordinary Rendition. Secret Prisons.

No more. I have decided to place a "hold" on the latest FISA bill that would have included amnesty for telecommunications companies that enabled the President's assault on the Constitution by illegally providing personal information on their customers without judicial authorization.

I said that I would do everything I could to stop this bill from passing, and I have. It's about delivering results -- and as I've said before, the FIRST thing I will do after being sworn into office is restore the Constitution. But we shouldn't have to wait until then to prevent the further erosion of our country's most treasured document. That's why I am stopping this bill today.

This is getting to be old hat. Why did we struggle to elect these people?

Senate Democrats cave into the telecommunications companies:

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. . . .

The draft Senate bill has the support of the intelligence committee's chairman, John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), and Bush's director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell. It will include full immunity for those companies that can demonstrate to a court that they acted pursuant to a legal directive in helping the government with surveillance in the United States.

Such a demonstration, which the bill says could be made in secret, would wipe out a series of pending lawsuits alleging violations of privacy rights by telecommunications companies that provided telephone records, summaries of e-mail traffic and other information to the government after Sept. 11, 2001, without receiving court warrants. Bush had repeatedly threatened to veto any legislation that lacked this provision.

Glenn Greenwald has a great piece on this and discusses why Democrats would ever do this. He says this cave is lead by Senators Jay Rockefeller who has received huge payments by the telecom industry and Mitch McConnell who has been demanding telecom amnesty.

This move basically declares that the telecommunications industry did nothing wrong though they allowed the government to spy on us without a warrant. As recently as yesterday Democrats have been saying they would never give amnesty to the telecommunications industry because they don't know what they did because the program has been so secretive.

I think these two quotes below sum it up better than I can:

"If they didn’t do anything wrong, why should they get retroactive immunity?" asks Christy Hardin Smith at Firedoglake. "And, worse, if it is likely that they broke laws, why on earth would the Senate just hand lawbreakers retroactive immunity before fact-finding on potential criminal conduct was even completed?!? That makes no logical or ethical sense."

Salon columnist Glenn Greenwald severely criticized all those supporting this bill including the media.

"If one actually thinks about, from scratch, what is being considered with this FISA law, it really is extraordinary. The very idea that we ought to allow the government new powers to eavesdrop on our calls and emails without warrants -- particularly since we know that they have been breaking the law for years to do just that -- is unfathomable," Greenwald writes.