NY Times Editorial Blisters Congressional Dems For FISA Cave-In
October 20, 2007 -- 2:02 PM EST // //
The other day I noted that the New York Times editorial page doesn't get the Web credit it deserves for being a voice of sanity at key moments when much of the opinion-making elite is either opting for the comfort of self-delusion or is simply AWOL.
Well, today's Times brings an important new editorial that tidily makes this point. It absolutely blisters the Senate intelligence committee for its FISA cave-in. More important, it supplies the necessary larger context for understanding what's happening -- specifically, that all too many Dem Congressional leaders are still nursing hangovers from their minority days and are acting as if the 2006 decision by voters to put them in control of Congress just never happened:
With Democrats Like These...This is right. To put this as simply as possible, there are virtually no other powerful institutional opinion-makers making these points. Yet they couldn't be more central to understanding what's actually happening right now in politics.Every now and then, we are tempted to double-check that the Democrats actually won control of Congress last year. It was particularly hard to tell this week. Democratic leaders were cowed, once again, by propaganda from the White House and failed, once again, to modernize the law on electronic spying in a way that permits robust intelligence gathering on terrorists without undermining the Constitution.
We were left wondering who is really in charge, when in a bipartisan press release announcing the agreement, the ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Kit Bond, described the bill as “a delicate arrangement of compromises” that could not be changed in any way. The committee’s chairman, Jay Rockefeller, didn’t object.
As the debate proceeds, Americans will be told that the delicate compromises were about how the government may spy on phone calls and electronic messages in the age of instant communications. Republicans have already started blowing hot air about any naysayers trying to stop spies from tracking terrorists.
No one is doing that. The question really is whether Congress should toss out chunks of the Constitution because Mr. Bush finds them inconvenient and some Democrats are afraid to look soft on terrorism...
...it was a very frustrating week in Washington. It was bad enough having a one-party government when Republicans controlled the White House and both houses of Congress. But the Democrats took over, and still the one-party system continues.
It's hardly every day that an opinion-maker as powerful as that of The Times editorial board raises its voice in support of crucial points such as these, which are largely confined to the blogosphere. And it's obviously something we should hope for more of. Yet we all spend so much time sticking pins into the Fred Hiatt and David Broder voodoo dolls that we often overlook it when it actually happens.
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