Amnesty Day for Bush and Lawbreaking Telecoms

Before I get to the bad news, this is too good to pass up. Watch Chris Dodd on the Senate floor passionately defend the constitution and rule of law.

I also thought this quote by constitutional law professor, Glenn Greenwald says it best:

‘The Bush administration will be gone in eleven months, but in the absence of some meaning accountability all of this will remain. If these theories remain undisturbed and unchallenged. And all of these crimes go un-investigated and unpunished, that will have a profound impact on changing our national character and further transforming the type of country we are.’

Unfortunately, that's all the good news I have to report, as Greenwald also wrote up an article on what we can expect to transpire in the Senate today, and its not good. Telecom companies will get immunity...as 12 Democrats joined all Republicans to pass the bill.

Greenwald writes:

The Senate today — led by Jay Rockefeller, enabled by Harry Reid, and with the active support of at least 12 (and probably more) Democrats, in conjunction with an as-always lockstep GOP caucus — will vote to legalize warrantless spying on the telephone calls and emails of Americans, and will also provide full retroactive amnesty to lawbreaking telecoms, thus forever putting an end to any efforts to investigate and obtain a judicial ruling regarding the Bush administration’s years-long illegal spying programs aimed at Americans. The long, hard efforts by AT&T, Verizon and their all-star, bipartisan cast of lobbyists to grease the wheels of the Senate — led by former Bush 41 Attorney General William Barr and former Clinton Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick — are about to pay huge dividends, as such noble efforts invariably do with our political establishment.

...

How far we’ve come — really: disgracefully tumbled — from the days of the Church Committee, which aggressively uncovered surveillance abuses and then drafted legislation to outlaw them and prevent them from ever occurring again. It is, of course, precisely those post-Watergate laws which the Bush administration and their telecom conspirators purposely violated, and for which they are about to receive permanent, lawless protection.

...

From Frank Church and the bipartisan oversight protections of the post-Watergate abuses in the mid-1970s to Jay Rockefeller, Dick Cheney, legalized warrantless eavesdropping and retroactive telecom amnesty in 2008 — that vivid collapse into the sewer illustrates as potently as anything could what has happened to this country over the last eight years.

Click here to read the article in its entirety.