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FEBRUARY 22, 2010, ISSUE   |   VIEW COVER   |   BUY THIS ISSUE   |   SUBSCRIBE TO NR



Andrew C. McCarthy

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Blunt Talk on Surveillance Reform
The whip weighs in.

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The surveillance-reform compromise bill, called the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, has overwhelmingly passed in the House. You can tell it must be a good deal by which of our lawmakers are angry and which aren’t.

The New York Times reports that one of its very favorite liberal Democrats, Jerrold Nadler of New York City, is an unhappy camper. No surprise there. Rep. Nadler — who was instrumental in winning a pardon (to be precise, a commutation) for Weather Underground terrorist Susan Rosenberg on Bill Clinton’s last day in office — is always available for a soundbite about how the Bush administration’s aggressive stance on terror is shredding the Constitution.

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Absurdly, Nadler told the Times the surveillance overhaul is “a fig leaf ... [that] abandons the Constitution’s protections and insulates lawless behavior from legal scrutiny.”

Of course, the Fourth Amendment had not heretofore been known to protect the privacy of alien terrorists calling each other outside the United States. Perhaps that’s why the bill, which denies such protection, passed by close to a 3-to-1 margin — and why the Senate Intelligence Committee’s bill, which Speaker Pelosi refused to permit a vote on for four months, would also have passed by a wide bipartisan margin, just as it did in the Senate. But now that we’ve “progressed” from post-9/11 to post-Boumediene (last week’s alarming Supreme Court decision that vested our alien terrorist enemies with constitutional habeas-corpus rights), who knows where all the progress will stop?

By contrast, Republican Whip Roy Blunt is content. I spoke with Congressman Blunt on Friday, and he underscored that, but for some new responsibilities imposed on the attorney general and the intelligence community regarding monitoring procedures, the overhaul restores our intelligence law to its original 1978 design: The intelligence community will be unhampered in its ability to collect foreign intelligence outside the United States.

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