FISA FISA FISA FISA

It's important, I think, to remind people that, even though the fight over the Intel committee's FISA bill has been centered around the issue of telecom immunity (and though the issue of telecom immunity is a big issue) the whole bill is bad. In fact in a lot of ways, the fourth amendment objections (to blanket warrants) are more important (if less easy to explain to the public) than the objections to the immunity provisions. Had Dodd's fixes been adopted, it would have turned a doubly unconstitutional bill into a simply unconstitutional bill, which, I suppose, counts as a substantial improvement, but, as Caroline Fredrickson said, "Being constitutional is like being pregnant – either you are or you aren’t." And this bill is not.