Matthew Continetti has a great column up on the House Democrats’ failure to renew the FISA bill that lapsed. Harry Reid & Dick Durbin have tried defending the lapsing of this important reform. Here’s something that Durbin said:

Says Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois, “The FISA law–even if we do not change it, gives ample authority to this president to continue to monitor the conversations of those who endanger the United States.”

That doesn’t pass the laugh test. If FISA were adequate in its 1978 version, then why was it changed in the PATRIOT Act? That’s the one thing that Sen. Durbin isn’t willing to answer. Herre’s some more Democrat spin:

Says House Intelligence Committee chairman Silvestre Reyes: “We cannot allow ourselves to be scared into suspending the Constitution.” Democratic national-security-adviser-in-waiting Richard Clarke writes that “FISA has and still works as the most valuable mechanism for monitoring our enemies.”

Rep. Reyes’ statement is pure spin. There’s nothing in that statement that’s defensible. Rep. Reyes would have us believe that to renew the Protect America Act would violate the principles of the Constitution. Simply put, I’d ask him to explain why he thinks that renewing the PAA would lead to the “suspending the Constitution”? As a follow-up, I’d ask this: if the bill requires “suspending the Constitution”, why did it pass? Why didn’t it the courts overturn the bill if it was unconstitutional? The courts didn’t overturn it because it wasn’t unconstitutional.

As for Richard Clarke’s statement, Mr. Continetti simply says this:

But any new wiretaps the government seeks will have to go through stringent FISA procedures, which require the government to show “probable cause” that a “U.S. person” is a “foreign power” or an “agent of a foreign power” before a search warrant targeting him can be issued. And this is troubling becausem pace Richard Clarke, the old FISA didn’t and doesn’t work.

Thank you, Mr. Continetti. The average American knows that this reform was needed to protect us from future terrorist attacks. The American people, by an almost 3-to-1 margin, think that it’s ok to conduct warrantless intercepts of terrorists. Here’s why this debate is even taking place:

The FISA court decided that calls or emails merely routed through the United States were, in fact, domestic communications falling under the “probable cause” evidentiary standard. It didn’t matter that the target and the recipient of his communications might both be abroad, if the electrons zipped across the United States, as they often do in a globally networked world, then a warrant was required to listen in. By the miracle of technology, Abu Omar and Mullah Mohamed in Pakistan could both be “U.S. persons.”

Mr. Continetti accurately states the legal opinion of FISA judges. The notion that intelligence surveillance is domestic just because it’s routed through a US switch is absurd. There isn’t a thinking person that would buy that spin if it came from Ms. Pelosi or Sen. Reid.

Meanwhile, the ACLU and the tort bar filed lawsuits against the telecommunication companies that had cooperated with the U.S. government in the Terrorist Surveillance Program. Naturally, the telecoms, fearing that they soon would be paying damages, grew wary of cooperation with the government. And some of the FISA judges, the same folks often accused of “rubberstamping” the executive’s wishes, raised the bar that needed to be met before counterterrorist surveillance could begin. Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell recently told Fox News Channel’s Chris Wallace that by summer 2007, “We were in extremis, because we had lost…about two-thirds of our [surveillance] capability.”

God forbid there be another terrorist attack on the United States’ homeland but if it happens, I’ll be on this computer attaching the blame to the trial attorneys’ lobby and their liberal enablers. God forbid that they swat the trial attorneys aside for being the parasites that they are. God forbid that they tell the telecom industry that it’s ok to help protect the US homeland without fear of attorneys suing them into the economic grave.

Here’s the truth that emerges: Democrats crave trial attorneys’ campaign contributions more than they care about protecting America against future terrorist attacks.

That’s the cold, hard truth that Democrats can’t spin.

Technorati Tags: FISA, Patriot Act, Reforms, ACLU, Sylvestre Reyes, Nancy Pelosi, Dick Durbin, NSA

Cross-posted at LetFreedomRingBlog

1. The FISA statute is hopelessly outdated. At the time it was written, there was neither e-mail nor a massive array of cellular telephone networks. There was no precedent at the time for communications between two persons outside the United States being routed through the United States. Moreover, the FISA court’s extension of the FISA to calls between foreigners routed through the US is a complete bastardization of the FISA statute and just further evidence that the language of the FISA act is completely outmoded–hence the necessity of the PAA.

   The Democrats are intent, and have been since they took over Congress in 2006, to deny President Bush any victory in the War on Terror or Iraq War even if it makes America less secure in the process. Part of this is driven by their desire to complete their liberal trifecta by winning the White House. But more troubling is that they see the United States as the bad guy, not the terrorists or foreign powers like Iran, and therefore find it perfectly fine to hobble the power of the national security establishment and the military to protect Americans from its enemies.

   God help us all if the Dems win the White House. If that happens, we better start brushing up on our sharia…

   Comment by The Surfing Conservative — February 24, 2008 @ 3:14 pm