Today Is The Day

And the pushback of fear begins:

With barely the thinnest veneer of shame, McConnell and Mukasey say that the Bingaman amendment -- which, as my Windy colleague Mike Lillis reported, "would delay the effective date of the immunity provision until inspectors general of the Dept. of Justice, the Pentagon and several other agencies have finished an investigation into the warrantless surveillance program and reported their findings to Congress" -- is unacceptable as a matter of national security!

Any amendment that would delay implementation of the liability protections in this matter is unacceptable. Providing prompt liability protection is critical to the national security. Accordingly, we, as well as the President's other senior advisers, will recommend that the President veto any bill that includes such an amendment.

Underlining in the original! This is beyond shameless. Telecommunications companies haven't had retroactive immunity for breaking the law, like, ever and not a single American has died as a result.

Granted, none of these amendments have anything to do with the expanding powers being given to a President who has already overreached his authority by leaps and bounds.

It's just a simple matter of knowing what the hell was going on (intercepting wholly domestic communications, including internet traffic, being among the items on the menu that the Bush Administration is truly worried about) before granting the get-of-jail-free cards to everyone involved:

The Senate on Tuesday is expected to take up three amendments to the House-passed compromise that expands White House spying powers under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA. All three aim to hold the telecom companies to account for their cooperation in the administration's warrantless wiretapping program, which, in the name of fighting terrorism, allowed the National Security Agency to intercept some domestic communications without a court order.


Under one amendment, the telecom immunity provision would be stripped out of the bill completely. The proposal is sponsored by Sens. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.), Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. A proposal to eliminate the immunity language, offered earlier in the year, failed by a wide margin, 67 to 31.


A second amendment, sponsored by Sen. Arlen Specter (Penn.), the highest ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee and a prominent critic of the administration about this program, would empower the court to deny the phone companies their immunity if it found that the administration's actions were unconstitutional.

The final amendment, sponsored by Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.), would delay the effective date of the immunity provision until inspectors general of the Dept. of Justice, the Pentagon and several other agencies have finished an investigation into the warrantless surveillance program and reported their findings to Congress. That investigation is already included in the House-passed compromise soon to be tackled in the Senate. But privacy groups argue that the investigation would hold greater significance if the conclusions can inform how to handle the participating telecoms.

Today is the day we find out just how strong our Constitutional democracy really is. And just how far some of our so-called representatives are willing to go to destroy it.