Wiretrapped by liberal base

Wall Street Journal Editorial:

Senate Democrats yesterday marshaled enough votes to block a permanent fix for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. They then failed to muster enough support for a 30-day extension of the bill passed last summer, which provides a Congressional imprimatur for the warrantless wiretapping of foreign terrorists. That bill, the Protect America Act, expires Friday.

Hillary Clinton said before the vote that the bill was too important to "shortchange debate" on it, even though Friday's deadline has been on the calendar since Congress passed the six-month patch last August. We suspect what she really means is that the issue is too important for her to take a clear stand on ahead of the next primaries.

As President, both Mrs. Clinton and rival Barack Obama would surely want the ability to spy on our enemies overseas. They are both smart enough to know, too, that much foreign communications pass through the U.S. owing to the nature of global electronic communications networks, a fact that FISA, written in 1978, takes no account of.

It strains credibility to believe, as Majority Leader Harry Reid claims, that the Senate needs another month to do what it couldn't in the past six. But Mr. Reid and his fellow Democrats are under intense pressure from the far left to deny Mr. Bush this authority. The tort bar, meanwhile, wants to preserve its ability to sue telephone companies for assisting the program in the days after 9/11.

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Anytime the Democrat base is out of touch with the rest of America it becomes a "tough issue" for Democrats and a tough vote. It is also going to become a really tough issue in November if Democrats don't ignore their kook base and do what is right for the national security, they will put themselves in the position of not even collecting the dots to connect on a future attack.

The paranoia of those who oppose intercepting enemy communications without a court order is a disease not a feature. No one in the government needs to intercept the communications of liberal Democrats to understand how badly they want to lose the war. They are pretty open about it and pretty fearful of victory. Frankly, no one in the government really cares what the liberals are saying among themselves unless they are in active communication with the enemy in which case no one should have any expectation of privacy.

Liberal Democrats would like to return to the failed lawfare policy of the 1990s which played into the enemy's hand and led to 9-11. This bill is evidence of their lack of seriousness in confronting the enemy and preventing his attacks.