RAW STORY
MSNBC's Rachel Maddow asked: "What if Congress had responded to Watergate by immunizing the executive branch's lawbreakers and giving Richard Nixon sweeping new powers to snoop?
"Oh, wait! They just did! They just took thirty years or so to get around to it."
H.R. 6304, updating the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, was passed by the Senate and awaits a pleased President Bush's signature Wednesday. The bill grants the executive branch virtually unchecked power to monitor Americans' electronic communications originating, or terminating, overseas, and immunizes from civil lawsuits the telecommunications companies that agreed to help the NSA eavesdrop on such communications without obtaining the proper warrants through the FISA court.
The people have a right to be disappointed in the Senate's approval of the new FISA bill, Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) told Maddow. However, the best remedy, he said, is a Democratic president, particularly a President Obama.
The legislation is a "catastrophe," Feingold lamented, and it "needs to be fixed at some point."
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