Let the Horsewhipping Begin
Sunday, February 17th, 2008Nancy Pelosi’s Democrats left Washington, DC for their district’s comforts without passing the FISA reform bill. In fact, they didn’t even debate the Senate bill that passed with 68 votes two days earlier. Pelosi’s collection of irresponsible legislators should be tarred and feathered in their hometown and national press every day that they aren’t in session. Investors’ Business Daily has started that tar and feathering with this editorial. Here’s the key paragraph:
Congress has had nearly seven months to renew and update this vital law. Yet just look at what the House of Reprehensibles was wasting its time with last week, when it should have been working night and day on FISA.
They didn’t stop there:
The Senate-passed bill that Pelosi and House Democrats consider less important than wedding receptions and steroids abuse got a bipartisan majority of 68 votes in the Senate last week. Much of it was written by a liberal Democrat, Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
The bill gives U.S. intelligence agencies “the tools they need to track down terrorists,” as Rockefeller noted. It also provides retroactive immunity to telecom carriers being sued for assisting in the terrorist surveillance program.
Firms such as AT&T (NYSE:SBT) (NYSE:T) , Sprint Nextel (NYSE:S) and Verizon (NYSE:VZC) (NYSE:VZ) face lengthy litigation, and possibly hundreds of millions of dollars in damages, spearheaded by the ACLU all because they helped save lives.
As Rockefeller, a foe of most of the president’s policies in the global war on terror, pointed out, “The companies believed their cooperation was necessary, legal and would help stop future terrorist attacks.”
Pelosi’s bunch care more about collecting campaign contributions from their nutroots crazies than they care about preventing the next terrorist attack. (I’m not saying that they don’t care about national security. I’m simply saying that their actions show that they just put a higher priority on collecting the crazies’ campaign contributions than on national security.) (more…)