Shame On Them Is Right (Leahy claiming shame on NSA phone tap)

[Robbien]

"Shame on us," Senate Judiciary Committee ranking member Patrick Leahy (D-Vt) said today as he held up a copy of USA Today's phone-record story, the one that prompted the President of the United States to trot himself out in front of reporters and say, well, say nothing that helps explain why the government in the name of fighting Al Qaeda is contracting with phone companies to catalogue billions of phone calls made by regular old Americans.

Shame on Congress is right. Only one branch of government can proactively perform a check on what the NSA is doing at the behest of the White House. Only one branch can force the executive branch to justify its massive and logically-suspect dragnet. Only one can require those telephone companies to publically explain why their customers were not informed of the data collection, much less defended from it. And yet that branch is both unable and unwilling to do anything meaningful to at least force both the snoopers and their corporate conspirators to come clean. It is a dark hour for the legislative branch of the federal government.
. . .


The Center for Constitutional Rights, a left-leaning group, announced today that 72 members of Congress had expressed support for the CCR's efforts to challenge the NSA spying program in court. If my math is correct, and sometimes it is, that is about one-eighth of the total number of pols in the House and Senate. That's not nearly good enough and at least Sen. Leahy has the courage to say so.

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/benchconference/2006/05/shame_on_them_is_right.html

[babylonsister]

1. I just hope ALL the Senators listened. nt