The FISA Fight continues — Congressional ‘leadership’ is once again preparing to destroy the Constitution and screw the American public they’re sworn to protect by passing illicit legislation under the guise of a “compromise” that will give illegal, unconstitutional retroactive immunity to all who participated in the illegal wiretapping and spying activities requested by President Bush — once again showing how low the depths of their corruption and lawlessness go.
This supposed “compromise” that Congressional Democrats have agreed to regarding spying powers and telecom amnesty is not a compromise at all. It gives Bush and the rest of his cohorts everything they’ve demanded all along.
Noted by Glenn Greenwald:
“Although, as I indicated yesterday, public reports about the bill’s telecom immunity provisions were unclear, I’ve now been able to confirm definitively that the “compromise” that Democrats have agreed to does contain guaranteed immunity for the telecoms. The bill provides that the federal courts are required to dismiss the suits and immunize the telecoms as long as conditions are met that everyone already knows will be fulfilled. Put another way, the bill simply provides that the federal courts must dismiss all lawsuits against telecoms for their illegal spying as long as telecoms can demonstrate “A, B, and C” — where “A, B and C” are already known in advance to be true and easily proven. The Democrat-supported bill is nothing more than a pre-ordained, mandated script provided to the courts to compel them to dismiss the telecom lawsuits.
Worse still, the conditions for dismissal in the Democrats’ “compromise” bill shows how corrupt and lawless they are. Courts are required to immunize telecoms as long as telecoms merely demonstrate that the illegal spying they enabled was requested by the President and was represented to them by the Executive branch to be lawful. Courts will be required to dismiss the lawsuits without any consideration whatsoever of whether these telecom-defendants actually broke the law.