By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY Posted Wednesday, February 13, 2008 4:20 PM PT
War On Terror: The Democratic Congress takes forever to pass a key law authorizing terrorist surveillance and shielding the telecom companies that facilitate it — proving again its incompetence on national security.
Related Topics: Global War On Terror Election 2008
After nearly seven months of pointless delay, the U.S. Senate has finally passed, by 68 to 29, an update to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, allowing the government to keep the tools it needs to continue to foil future terrorist attacks.
The measure also grants immunity from civil lawsuits to telecommunications firms that aided the National Security Agency in post-9/11 surveillance. (An attempt to remove the telecom protection from the bill by Democratic Sens. Chris Dodd of Connecticut and Russ Feingold of Wisconsin failed, 67 to 31.)
Senate passage of the FISA renewal — and by such a resounding margin — is another victory for President Bush, who simply refuses to act like the lame duck the big media insist he is. With a congressional recess impending, however, the House Democratic leadership now seems poised to delay acting on the Senate bill.
The ingratitude of so many congressional Democrats for a program that has saved so many lives, and their irresponsibility in making us vulnerable to future attack, is incomprehensible.
Still, Democratic senators as liberal as Barbara Mikulski of Maryland and Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia voted against their party colleagues. (As Senate Intelligence Committee chairman, Rockefeller knows more than most about the effectiveness of NSA surveillance; Mikulski is an intelligence panel member too.)
Rockefeller defended the telecom carriers, who could lose hundreds of millions of dollars in lengthy litigation for their good-faith cooperation to help prevent terrorism.
Yet the front-runner for the Democratic nomination for president, Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, was one of the 31 Democrats who voted not to protect those heroic companies from the more than 40 lawsuits pending against them. (Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York missed the votes.)
The American Civil Liberties Union, the force behind those lawsuits, outrageously called those firms "accomplices" in crimes against the Fourth Amendment.
They, Sen. Obama and all the other radicals who insist on us being unshielded from terrorism should be reminded of the first words of that fourth part of our Bill of Rights: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons" — a right that thousands of Americans lost bloodily less than 6 1/2 years ago.
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