Was it really less than a month ago that House leaders tried to pass a deeply flawed rewrite of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act by running roughshod over the opposition? As we covered at the time, the House leadership version of FISA actually makes it harder to conduct surveillance of terrorists in a number of ways. For example, it requires a court order for surveillance any time a call might involve an American. Since we do not know who a terrorist may call in advance, it essentially requires a court order to target foreigners overseas. It also subjects military intelligence to FISA–so our forces in Iraq, for example, would require a court order before being permitted to listen in on communications by suspected terrorists. It would also require intelligence agencies to compile a database of U.S. citizens potentially involved in targeted communications. Observers of this debate will recall that when the Democrats tried to ram the bill through with no debate last month, they were stymied by a proposed ‘motion to recommit’ that would have said that nothing in the bill would prevent the United States ‘from conducting surveillance needed to prevent Osama Bin Laden, Al Qaeda, or any other foreign terrorist organization…from attacking the United States.’ Democrats complained both that the bill already contained this protection, and that they had to vote against it–which would have effectively killed the bill. What have the Democrats learned from this experience? Not much. They have again brought their flawed FISA bill to the floor. They have not amended the bill to correct the problems it creates for intelligence agencies and they have again moved to block all amendments. The sole move they have made to ensure that this debate goes better than the first is to press all Democrats to vote against the GOP motion–no matter what it says. We’ll find out tonight whether this works any better for them than it did the last time.
