You can thank our lovely Senator from Kansas for this one:
The Senate will not investigate the domestic surveillance program.
“An investigation at this point basically would be detrimental to this highly classified program and our efforts to reach some accommodation with the administration,” said Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kansas.
Roberts said he was arranging a deal with the White House to modify the 1978 law governing electronic surveillance and to provide members of Congress with more extensive briefings on the closely guarded National Security Agency program.
MotherFUCKERS. Oh, you broke the law? Don’t worry….we’ll work with you to modify the law AFTER you’ve broken it.
That’s it, folks. It was a nice democracy while it lasted.
I’m disgusted. I can’t even find the words.
Wow. I don’t have words either. I feel like I should say something worthy of the moral outrage I feel, but I’m just too appalled for anything truly eloquent to come to mind.
At least Specter (Judiciary Committee chair) isn’t buying it. He’s still pissed off. (Or at least he was yesterday evening.)
In Article I, Section 9 of the U.S. Constitution, there is a line which reads, “No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.”
What this means is no law can be passed that either causes someone to be tried for a crime that wasn’t previously legal or vice-versa.
So even if they modify the 1978, FISA anyone who commited illegalities against it before it was modified IS STILL CRIMINALLY ACCOUNTABLE.
Proofread, Slicer, proofread!
The second sentence should read: “What this means is no law can be passed that either causes someone to be tried for a crime that was previously legal or vice-versa.”.
at the risk of being told to fuck off again…
Clearly it was a game of Constitutional chicken, and Congress blinked.
Congress can’t pass a law that restricts the Constitutional authority of the President. Does FISA fall into this category?
I think Congress might have been more willing to pursue this ideological fight– a separation of powers issue on an ideological level– if the political stakes weren’t so high. Nobody’s going to go to the mat, not now, not this specific issue, to put themselves on the record ‘against the President’ and ‘for the terrorists.’