The Definite Article

At least for the moment. She stood up to the Bush White House and suggested that they take more time to review the provisions of the Protect America Act.

What this bill would do is prevent legal oversight of the Executive Branch, whose overzealous actions might turn out to be illegal. It grants retroactive immunity to AT&T and Verizon from lawsuits that allege that those companies violated their rights by cooperating with a request from the White House. It's worth noting that Qwest absolutely refused to cooperate and did not forward every single phone call to the NSA, although AT&T and Verizon did.

The lawsuits are for enough in damages to force the Telcos to switch hands. If this happens, it would effectively prevent any future CEOs from wholesale illegal spying on the American public; the consequences would be disgrace, loss of job, prison time, and personal loss of great huge gobs of cash. It would make it more difficult for future presidents of any party to conduct illegal searches or violate the Constitution in the same way.

In other words, it is a good thing. Let us hope that those lawsuits succeed. In order for them to succeed, though, the first step is for this vile manipulation of and utter contempt for legal process from the White House and the Senate to be stopped. Nancy Pelosi and the House are the best chance that this could happen.

The title is five words I thought I'd never, by the way. I'm not a Democrat and usually decry them as the party of group politics.

But this issue has been an inversion of the normal conservative/liberal split. On one side stand the Cato Institute, Reason Magazine, myself and most of the Democratic party, which makes for strange bedfellows. On the other side are George Bush, Ted Poe, Anne Coulter and John McCain. I think that the Republican Senators - plus the 17 Democrats who voted with them - embarrassed themselves.

Yes, we want to be safe. Yes, we think that terrorists should get spied on. But they do, so the only reason for this bill is to keep Bush's friends in control of the phone company. It would be a perfect conspiracy theory, except it's being done in plain sight, completely out in the open, without even cursory attempts to hide it or dress it up.

In the interest of fairness, I must point out that Roger Pilton has completely lost his mind supports the Protect America Act. He's a chair at the Cato Institute. His own colleagues disagree with him. The best source to unravel his argument is basic common sense and the ability to spot internal inconsistency. Failing that, try his colleagues at the Cato Institute. Compare his article with these links. To his credit, he does at least acknowledge that most of his colleagues at Cato disagree with him.