Awful Sorry About That Lost Fourth Amendment

The Democrats are now sorry, so sorry, about the FISA bill.

At issue now is the temporary update to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) passed earlier this month, just before Congress fled Capitol Hill for its summer break. This update was made necessary when the secretive judicial body that oversees the wiretapping, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, banned eavesdropping on foreigners whose communications were being routed through the United States.

The legal update, which expires in six months, allows the NSA to resume siphoning such communications. In one of its key changes, US intelligence no longer needs to know that at least one of the parties to a communication is abroad prior to eavesdropping. It needs only to "reasonably believe" that one person is off US soil.

In the weeks since this bill's passage some Democrats have begun to regret the manner in which it was approved. They feel the vote was held in haste, with summer break looming. And they've started to worry that by changing just a few words in a massive piece of law they've opened the door to practices they did not intend.

It's completely sad that it takes things like New York Times articles for legislators to recognize the enormity of what they've done. Don't they have staffers? Doesn't anyone in the office read the law?

This is such a depressingly familiar pattern. They pass a law in haste, get slammed for it by the base, then leak out that they regret doing things like allowing the Bush Administration to do physical searches on American soil and commandeer business records (which the new FISA bill does authorize, 'tis true). It's a treadmill this country simply must get off. And as for the Democrats smacking their heads and saying, "I shoulda had a V-8," it's too darn late for all that. The White House is emboldened by this willing giveaway of civil liberties. They're allowing local authorities to use spy satellites in data collection, fercryinoutloud. This genie will be very hard to get back in the bottle. Jonathan Alter knows it:

I hate to sound melodramatic about it, but while everyone was at the beach or "The Simpsons Movie" on the first weekend in August, the U.S. government shredded the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, the one requiring court-approved "probable cause" before Americans can be searched or spied upon. This is not the feverish imagination of left-wing bloggers and the ACLU. It's the plain truth of where we've come as a country, at the behest of a president who has betrayed his oath to defend the Constitution and with the acquiescence of Democratic congressional leaders who know better. Historians will likely see this episode as a classic case of fear—both physical and political—trumping principle amid the ancient tension between personal freedom and national security.

(Nice dig at bloggers there, while at the same time validating what we've been saying for years. I guess we've committed the sin of being too right too soon.)

Quit talking about regrets and do something about it. Your approval ratings are in the toilet because of this constant enabling of Bush Administration policies that the country abhors. Wake the fuck up before we're knee-deep in an attack on Iran.