Damn Dems

Part Nonillion in an Evidently Neverending Series

Afraid to be labeled soft on terror and desperate for their summer holiday, the Democrats in August hastily passed a spectacularly appalling piece of legislation granting the Bush administration the ability to do warrantless surveillance of the phone calls and e-mails of American citizens, sans judicial supervision and Congressional oversight. They tried to quell the resulting outrage by approving the legislation for only six months and promising they'd fix the bill as soon as they returned from vacation.

Well, guess what?

Senate Democrats and Republicans reached agreement with the Bush administration yesterday on the terms of new legislation to control the federal government's domestic surveillance program, which includes a highly controversial grant of legal immunity to telecommunications companies that have assisted the program, according to congressional sources.

The draft Senate bill has the support of the intelligence committee's chairman, John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), and Bush's director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell. It will include full immunity for those companies that can demonstrate to a court that they acted pursuant to a legal directive in helping the government with surveillance in the United States.

Yes, you read that right. The legislation now includes immunity for the corporate douchebags who have passing on your info to the government whenever they ask for it, legal or not. Why? Because Bush threatened to veto any legislation that lacked the immunity-for-secret-demonstration-of-legality provision. And still apparently don't know now not to act like the fucking minority.

Meanwhile, progressive Dems were still worried that the bill didn't protect basic Constitutional rights, but conservative Dems were "worried about Republicans' charges that the Democratic bill extended too many rights to suspected terrorists." Caroline Frederickson of ACLU, says the GOP was then able to exploit the lack of unity among Democrats: "It was a total meltdown."

I don't even know what to say anymore.