There are a couple of very strange bedfellows appearing together these days on the Senate floor -- The Economic Stimulus Package and the effort to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act
(FISA).  The Democrats failed by one vote to get their package past the
waiting Republican filibuster.  OCP (our current president) will
probably get his way for the umpteenth time with this spending
measure.  And it is not a tragedy for the country.



Action regarding the FISA reauthorization is
another thing.  If it is passed into law the way the Bush
administration and their Republican Senate surrogates want, it will be
a tragedy for the country.  The resulting diminution of Fourth
Amendment rights to privacy and prohibition of unreasonable search and
seizure is incalculable.



Do not just take my word for it.  Constitutional lawyer Glenn Greenwald often posts about this issue at Salon.com.  To quote from his most recent article two days ago:

This is really, really scary. We better forget about checks and
balances and oversight and restraints of any kind and everything else
and just make sure that the President can spy on our emails and
telephone calls with no oversight, otherwise Al Qaeda is going to
slaughter us in our Homeland. And we also better make sure that
telecommunications corporations don't have consequences when they break
the law, otherwise we're doomed, because Al Qaeda is coming.

What do I mean, more specifically ? At my main blog, South by Southwest, I often write about the FISA flap.  The points I make are these:

1) Telecommunications companies scoop up (data mine) our communications
for the government to look at if they choose, much of the time without
the warrant required in the Constitution.

2)  The Bush administration is holding the current legislation hostage
to a grant of retroactive immunity to these companies for that unlawful
behavior begun almost at the start of Bush's term.

3)  This would be unconstitutional because Congress is forbidden from
imposing its will on court decisions, under the separation of powers
doctrine.

4)  In addition to the Congressional Intelligence committees overseeing
and helping the National Security apparatus to "protect Americans" from
terrorists, the Judiciary Committees have a co-equal duty to "protect
American"  civil liberties under the constitution.

5)  The complexity of the current world of electronic surveillance and
the FISA statutes that govern the Governments use of it to spy on
people, does not  excuse Congress from exercising very informed and
vigorous oversight of the entire intelligence community.  The Executive
Branch claims that certification by the Attorney General or the
Director of National Intelligence constitutes some sort official
oversight.  It does not.  Self-monitoring in not the oversight required
of the three co-equal branches of government to check and balance each
other under the U.S. constitution.

6) No Senator or House member is required to get a security clearance. 
The Bush administration  cannot lawfully deny them access to the
official  information held by the Executive branch.  A fight about it
would be mediated by the courts, but no one ever wants to take it to
that level and precipitate a so-called constitutional crisis.



And so these strange bedfellows -- intervening in an economic
recession and intervening in the collection of foreign and domestic
intelligence -- live together on the Senate floor.  They always
have to fight to get the chance to amend the legislation, to get the
obligatory 60 votes on anything that matters, and to get the interest
of legislators' constituencies.



I guarantee it is worth your interest, study and citizen action. 
The recession will come and go, having its own way with us.  But FISA
is not like that.  Domestic surveillance will have its way with us,
unless we say "no," through our elected representatives.  This link
contains all the phone numbers you need, including free "800" numbers that can transfer you to Senate offices.