Wannabe king George woke up Wednesday morning and decided he was no lame duck president after all, empowered by the cowardly vote yesterday in the United States Senate granting his administration unlimited powers to spy on innocent American citizens and let the telephone companies off the hook for their illegal scheme.

So he started out his day browbeating the House to pass the same law and even got the Associated Press to run his press release saying, “…terrorists are planning new attacks on our country … that will make Sept. 11 pale by comparison.”

Bush said he would not agree to giving the House more time to debate a measure the Senate passed Tuesday governing the government’s ability to work with telecommunications companies to eavesdrop on phone calls and e-mails between “suspected terrorists,” according to the AP. Do they not realize he is a lame duck who has broken the law and lied time and time again and that under the Constitution, it is the job of Congress to write the laws, not the president?

The bill gives phone companies retroactive protection from lawsuits filed on the basis of cooperation they gave the government without court permission, the AP reports, ignoring the fact that this government has not even paid the bills the phone companies charged to do the illegal sweeping and storage and data mining on millions of phone calls, e-mail messages and Web browsing trails of virtually everyone in this country.

“We need the cooperation of telecommunications companies,” Bush said. “If these companies are subjected to lawsuits costing billions of dollars, they won’t participate, they won’t help us.”

Well, good. They should voluntarily stop helping this administration break the law and stand up to his kingdom as well.

About 40 lawsuits have been filed against telecom companies by people alleging violations of wiretapping and privacy laws, but to its credit, the House did not include the immunity provision in a similar bill it passed last year.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers says he still opposes retroactive immunity. We will be watching today to see how firm he stands.

“There is no basis for the broad telecommunications company amnesty provisions advocated by the administration,” Conyers wrote in a letter to White House Counsel Fred Fielding asking for documents about the wiretapping program. The documents have been withheld from Congress.

It would be nice to see the House stand up to Bush and strip him of his spying power if he does not back down on the telecom immunity issue. The only way we are ever going to figure out just how bad our Constitution and our laws have been violated by White House officials is to get to the bottom of what the telephone companies and Internet service providers did when they complied with the illegal order to go along with the National Security Agency and spy on us all.

This administration cannot point to a single, solid case of domestic terrorism it stopped by this blatant violation of the Fourth Amendment’s provisions against illegal searches and seizures.

Watch the action on C-SPAN today and urge your Representatives in Congress to oppose telecom immunity.

Tags: Domestic Surveillance, Liberty vs. Security

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