There’s going to be some ugly legislation getting pushed through in the next sixteen months:
President Bush signed into law on Sunday legislation that broadly expanded the government’s authority to eavesdrop on the international telephone calls and e-mail messages of American citizens without warrants.
Congressional aides and others familiar with the details of the law said that its impact went far beyond the small fixes that administration officials had said were needed to gather information about foreign terrorists. They said seemingly subtle changes in legislative language would sharply alter the legal limits on the government’s ability to monitor millions of phone calls and e-mail messages going in and out of the United States.
They also said that the new law for the first time provided a legal framework for much of the surveillance without warrants that was being conducted in secret by the National Security Agency and outside the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the 1978 law that is supposed to regulate the way the government can listen to the private communications of American citizens.
Just remember, Republicans, you voted for this. You did this to yourselves by failing to understand a counterintuitive principle. It took Nixon to go to China, it took a Democrat to do NAFTA, it takes a Republican to shed American liberties.
The wrong Republican is usually worse than the worst Democrat. So, it’s got to be comforting to know that all those expansions of government power you thought were so necessary are now soon to be in the hands of the Lizard Queen.