ACLU Condemns Senate for Passing Spy Law Changes

The new and improved warrantless surveillance program is now approved by the Democratic led House and Senate and signed into law. Naturally, the ACLU are quite upset:

The American Civil Liberties Union today condemned the House and Senate for bowing to pressure from the Bush administration and rushing to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The administration lobbied heavily to alter the legislation before Congress recessed. The White House pushed for sweeping changes to the spy law after a FISA court judge recently rejected its use of wide-scale, untargeted surveillance. The bill was passed in the Senate by a vote of 60 to 28, and the House is poised to take up the same legislation late tonight.

“We are deeply disappointed that the president’s tactics of fearmongering have once again forced Congress into submission,” said Anthony Romero, executive director of the ACLU. “That a Democratically-controlled Senate would be strong-armed by the Bush administration is astonishing. This Congress may prove to be as spineless in standing up to the Bush Administration as the one that enacted the Patriot Act or the Military Commissions Act.”

There are many good points to make about political pressure when you have the majority, know what you’ve molded your believers to believe, and then approve of the opposite. There is a lot to be said about standing on principle there. The left are quickly whipping their representatives in the blogosphere today though. Check out Glenn Greenwald and memeorandum for all that.

Washington Post:

THE DEMOCRATIC-led Congress, more concerned with protecting its political backside than with safeguarding the privacy of American citizens, left town early yesterday after caving in to administration demands that it allow warrantless surveillance of the phone calls and e-mails of American citizens, with scant judicial supervision and no reporting to Congress about how many communications are being intercepted. To call this legislation ill-considered is to give it too much credit: It was scarcely considered at all. Instead, it was strong-armed through both chambers by an administration that seized the opportunity to write its warrantless wiretapping program into law — or, more precisely, to write it out from under any real legal restrictions.

Tigerhawk responds:

I was unaware that President Bush — who has less political influence than half the bloggers at YearlyKos — was in a position to strong-arm the Democratic leadership of the United States Congress. The very idea is as absurd as it is intellectually dishonest. The Post simply prefers to denounce the strawman “strongarm” tactics of the administration than admit to the more likely explanation that most Americans believe that if you phone somebody named Mohammad inside a Muslim police state known to fund, harbor, or suffer to exist terrorists the NSA should listen to your conversation. Apparently more than a few Democrats in Congress agree with that position, or are unwilling to be caught arguing the other side of it.

I’m glad the important legislation got passed in the long of it all. However, the main point to note here is that of principle. Agree or disagree on whether the original principle was right or wrong, once you take a side people expect you to be steadfast. In this case, as stubborn as they are, the ACLU beats out the Democrats hands down.

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