More Do Nothing Democrats

Article By Writer Michael Kraft Author: Michael Kraft
Published: February 3, 2008
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“Senate Democrats yesterday marshaled enough votes to block a permanent fix for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. They then failed to muster enough support for a 30-day extension of the bill passed last summer, which provides a Congressional imprimatur for the warrantless wiretapping of foreign terrorists. That bill, the Protect America Act, expires Friday.

Hillary Clinton said before the vote that the bill was too important to “shortchange debate” on it, even though Friday’s deadline has been on the calendar since Congress passed the six-month patch last August. We suspect what she really means is that the issue is too important for her to take a clear stand on ahead of the next primaries.

As President, both Mrs. Clinton and rival Barack Obama would surely want the ability to spy on our enemies overseas. They are both smart enough to know, too, that much foreign communications pass through the U.S. owing to the nature of global electronic communications networks, a fact that FISA, written in 1978, takes no account of.

It strains credibility to believe, as Majority Leader Harry Reid claims, that the Senate needs another month to do what it couldn’t in the past six. But Mr. Reid and his fellow Democrats are under intense pressure from the far left to deny Mr. Bush this authority. The tort bar, meanwhile, wants to preserve its ability to sue telephone companies for assisting the program in the days after 9/11″

From NCGOP and a Wall Street Journal editorial.

More of the congress doing nothing