House Passes Spy Bill, Rejects Telcom Amnesty Despite Veto Threat
Democrats continued their defiance of President Bush on Friday over his secret wiretapping program, passing a spying bill that calls for a commission to investigate the program, and refusing to give amnesty to telecoms that collaborated with the warrantless surveillance.
House Democratic leaders secured passage of the spying bill known as the FISA Amendments Act by a vote of 213 to 197, four weeks after a similar measure was defeated by a coalition of Republicans and conservative Democrats. That defeat led to the expiration of a temporary spying measure, setting off a week-long Republican effort to scare the American people with phantoms of lost wiretaps…
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which brought the leading suit against the nation’s telecoms, applauded the House’s moxie.
“Amnesty proponents have been claiming on the Hill for months that phone companies like AT&T had a good faith belief that the NSA program was legal,” EFF senior staff attorney Kevin Bankston said. “Under this bill, the companies could do what they should have been able to do all along: tell that story to a judge.”
The White House had no such kind words, saying the bill was “partisan” and would be “dead on arrival” in the Senate.
We need to applaud this. I had a recurring feeling they were going to go the other way on this. This is something.
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