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The Seattle Post-Intelligencer:
According the American Civil Liberties Union, the president could have extended the act until Congress could figure out how to hammer out a palatable version of the FISA bill. But, says Timothy Sparapani, senior legislative counsel, on the ACLU's Web site, "The president continues to misrepresent the situation with FISA. Fear mongering and making unsubstantiated claims of lost intelligence does not help Congress reach a resolution."
No, but it might force Congress' hand, nonetheless, into passing a version of the bill that has everything Bush wants.
He's already threatened to veto anything less. But what of those who feel the government is violating their privacy?
"Suck it up," said the president of the United States, the same guy who led the charge into Iraq to, you guessed it, protect our freedoms.
We'd like to take this opportunity to remind the House that we'd like to see less sucking up and more standing up, please.
The Houston Chronicle:
What this dispute is really about is shielding telecoms from any responsibility for enabling surveillance of customers that might have violated their constitutional rights to privacy.
It's understandable that Bush would want to prevent court scrutiny of a potentially illegal spying program that operated outside the law for so long. But the administration is putting the protection of corporations and partisan posturing above the constitutional rights of the American people.
The San Jose Mercury News:
Congress is supposed to keep presidents from overreaching. Since the Senate has already caved, it's up to the House to defend both our privacy rights and the principle of accountability against the president's power grab.
Americans didn't buy it when Richard Nixon asserted, "When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal."
They shouldn't buy that argument now, either.
The Philadelphia Daily News:
"Telecom immunity" legislation could just as accurately be called "justice obstruction" legislation. If passed, it not only lets lawbreakers avoid detection, it provides a blank check for future spying. Just cry wolf - er, terror.
Right now, your rights to privacy are hanging by a thread in the U.S. House of Representatives.
On Feb.16, 19 Democratic senators who should have known better got so weak in the knees at the thought of being labeled "soft on terror" that they voted to give the telecom companies the pass from prosecution that Bush demanded....
Contact members of the House and tell them to take these threats seriously - that is, the threats to our privacy rights, and the threat to the rule of law represented by "telecom immunity."
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