For the last few weeks I’ve watched in slow-motion horror as the Congress moved towards passage of the colossally-bad FISA bill that updates needed surveillance powers guts the Fourth Amendment. Actually, no, that’s not the worst part, if you can believe it. Because the Democrats in Congress have no spine whatsoever, we have just enacted into law Nixon’s infamous dictum:

When the president does it, that means it’s not illegal.

Just ponder that for a moment. Not even 40 years after the biggest abuser of executive power in these colonies since … well, since the previous King George, I suppose. And now his theory has been made the law of the land. So it’s the Fourth Amendment, as well as basically the parts of the Constitution that used to put limits on the power of the Executive branch, that are gone.L’État, c’est moi indeed.

Now, I’m not particularly naïve about the sausage factory. I know that most of the time you have to compromise to get anything done. But what’s so galling about this latest Democrat capitulation is that it was utterly unnecessary. The Current Occupant has the lowest approval rating ever recorded. Ever. A comment on DailyKos really sums this up:

By the time the election rolls around, the only people left supporting Bush will be the Democrats in the House and Senate.

And just in case you’re still under the delusion that these policies have no impact on anyone but The Terrorists… In my professional world, some of my customers are not in the US. They have laid a (non-negotiable) condition on us that their data can never be on a server located in the US, precisely for this reason.

I’m physically ill.

Update: The indomitable Glenn Greenwald over at Salon has this remarkably concise summary of just what happened:

“Anticlimactic” is a mild description for a scandal that began with disclosure that the President of the United States and the telecom industry were committing felonies for years in how they spied on American citizens, only to end with a Congress controlled by the “opposition party” legalizing the surveillance, protecting the lawbreakers, terminating the only meaningful process for discovering what really happened, and embracing the premise that the President has the power to order private actors to break the law as long as, in his sole discretion, he decrees that doing so is legal.

Update 2
You might ask yourself, “well, it’s probably a bunch of noise over stuff that wasn’t really a big deal.” Here’s Senator Feingold from yesterday’s so-called debate:

I sit on the Intelligence and Judiciary Committees, and I am one of the few members of this body who has been fully briefed on the warrantless wiretapping program. And, based on what I know, I can promise that if more information is declassified about the program in the future, as is likely to happen either due to the Inspector General report, the election of a new President, or simply the passage of time, members of this body will regret that we passed this legislation.