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Immunity

Jill

So fucked:

The Senate has approved a bill overhauling the rules on secret government eavesdropping and granting immunity to telecom companies that helped listen in on Americans after Sept. 11.

The Senate passed the bill Wednesday, 69-28. It turned back three amendments that would have watered down, delayed or stripped away the immunity provision demanded by President Bush.

When the president signs the bill, as expected, it will effectively dismiss some 40 lawsuits filed against telecommunications companies for alleged violations of wiretapping and privacy laws.

The bill’s passage ends almost a year of political wrangling over eavesdropping rules.

I still can’t believe we’re even having this conversation. What a pathetic and disappointing vote.

20 thoughts on Immunity

  1. so lame, but not shocking.

    Remember, our politicans are the very same assholes who refuse to impeach Bush for any crimes that he has committed against humanity.

    Just a few more months and Bush will step down from office. Yet no one has taken large-scale action against him in the entire course of 8 years!!!!

    PATHETIC.

  2. Right or wrong, the wiretapping program is highly popular among most Americans. We have nobody to blame but ourselves.

  3. Um… I think we can blame the Senators and the Americans who supported the wiretapping program. I don’t take personal responsibility for the idiocy of other Americans.

  4. Well…right sorry Jill I was refering to the collective “we.” It just pisses me off how ignorant most Americans are about this….we already could spy on people and get retroactive warrants – why do they need this expanded program? It was obviously shady.

    I wonder if there could be a legal challenge to this? What is the scope of Congress’ power under Article III to strip jurisdiction? Surely if the FISA program ITSELF violated the Constitution, Congress couldn’t strip federal jurisdiction. Does this apply to state courts as well?

  5. I checked the roll call on the Senate site. Obama voted yea. Clinton voted nea. McCain was reportedly campaigning.

  6. I heard that too, Gidget. And Obama has spoken out against the wiretapping program in the past. Oh, disillusionment…

  7. So long as Obama gets elected president, I wouldn’t worry about any of these overreaches of Federal power for a while after that. Sorry to be paranoid about this sort of thing, but the “government must do whatever it takes to protect us against the scary brown people” crowd will turn on a dime once a Democrat is in charge (look at how they hounded Clinton when he tried to do anything about terrorism), especially with a Democrat who is, shall we say, not particularly melanically challenged in charge. All those “national security at all costs” drones will suddenly rediscover their commitment to “the gummint shouldn’t have too much power” “libertarianism”.

    What bugs me the most though about this “immunity bill” is not granting the Telcos immunity per se, but that, if TeeVee law shows have taught us anything, before you give someone immunity, you need to make sure you get something out of them to make it worth it. What, other than campaign contributions, are the Dems. getting?

    Fundamentally, though, I gotta agree (as usual) with Jay on this one: if voters really were against immunity, the pols would have responded. If our system is broke, it’s not because politicians are too “cowardly” — bravery ain’t part of their job — it’s because the electoral incentives toward keeping the system fixed are not there. The American people have, for instance (as I am wont to point out) forgotten the lesson of Federalist #10 — “ambition must be made to check ambition” — nowadays anybody with ambition will try to look like they have none (and will check nothing) simply because looking ambitious means “you’re just another politician who’s only after my vote”.

    If people voted for politicians who’s ambition checked the ambitions of others, then we’d be a lot freer today. The thing about a democratic republic is that everyone is stuck with the government the majority of voters deserve.

    If the majority of people would be dedicated to the notion of their citizenship in the polis (instead of clinging to a false and shallow cynicism that engagement in the polis is an exercise in futility), then we’d have the better government we would deserve. But people have adopted the mentality of their manoral masters, who operate out of a place of fear of the hoi palloi, that democratic political engagement is polluting — thus we have the polluted government the majority wills into existance by their expectations of such.

  8. Argh. Yoda’s quote about fear leading to the darkside is quite apt here. 🙁

    Obama voted yea. Clinton voted nea.

    At least my Senator is opposing this Orwellian bill. 🙂

  9. Yes, I [insert extraordinarily coarse adjective here] agree. Those wankers. Even the one I like.

  11. I mean, not a lawsuit, but whatever the legalese is for challenging the constitutionality of the bill in court.

  12. I still can’t believe we’re even having this conversation.

    Believe. It’s an election year and Democrats (including Obama) are afraid that Republicans are going to call them defeatists and terrorist supporters. Dems have been killing this bill for a year. Now they cave when the party is at it’s strongest and the McCain campaign is floundering. These people lack the courage to back their convictions.

    I think we can blame the Senators and the Americans who supported the wiretapping program. Support for warrantless wiretapping was never strong. There were never people protesting in the streets demanding that the Bush administration tap their phones and email accounts. I bet most of the people that polled in approval of warrantless wiretapping don’t understand the FISA court or the implications.

  13. Thank you senator Obama and you other “democrats.” You made Bush a happy man today. After all, I’d be happy too if everyone hated me but I was still able to bitch slap the House and the Senate even though its controlled by the other party.

    Change you can believe in . . . to the constitution and our civil liberties, anyway.

  14. i dont recall where, but i read a legal analysis of the bill that stated in its current form telecoms are immune from civil lawsuits, but arent immune to criminal lawsuits, in which case i dont much mind, id much rather see criminal prosecutions of those asshats anyhow.

  16. Right or wrong, the wiretapping program is highly popular among most Americans.

    The evidence of this is what exactly?

    I’ll cut to the chase: this is false. Depending on how the question is asked it changes a lot, but “highly popular” is just flat wrong. Which is what makes this whole thing so silly.

  17. There were a couple of telecoms that said no to the wiretapping. They were harrassed and threatened by the govt. But they held out. That story rarely gets told. Others caved – the big telecoms. Despite getting legal advice it could come back to bite them. They deserve being held to the law.

    Obama had nothing to gain by voting for this law except protectionism for corporations. It was not at risk for not passing, and he could have protected freedom by voting against it. He did not. This was his “Iraq war vote.” He trashed Hillary for voting for the initial funding of he war – while he goes and does this that trashes our freedoms. Did he do it to get support from conservative voters? Well…what would he have done as Senator of New York after 9/11? Not vote for the intial war funding? You can bet Obama does and stands for whatever the wind blowing tells him to. He’s an illusionist. He will sell out anything, including freedoms.

  19. Argh. Yoda’s quote about fear leading to the darkside is quite apt here. 🙁 – exholt

    Actually with all this terrorism fearmongering, I can’t help but think of “The Monsters are due on Maple Street” … especially considering the role of fear in enabling us to essentially do things the terrorists want to be done (e.g. removing Saddam Hussein from power).

    I wish Obama would have voted no on this and merely used a recycled speech “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”.

  20. So, apart from corporations not being people, is there really much difference between:

    1. Granting undocumented workers a path to citizenship (“amnesty,” if you will);

    and

    2. Granting retroactive civil immunity to telecoms acting at the behest of the Executive branch?

    I see both as examples where a law prohibited a certain conduct and the government either explicitly or implicitly encouraged ignoring that law.

    And now that things have been done, the only question remains is whether it would be prudent to prosecute the broken law or not? Is my logic flawed on this matter?

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