Give 'em hell... sorta

Here's a brief warrantless wiretapping retrospective from Glenn Greenwald:

It's worth taking a step back and recalling that all of this is the result of the December, 2005 story by the New York Times which first reported that the Bush administration was illegally spying on Americans for many years without warrants of any kind. All sorts of "controversy" erupted from that story. Democrats everywhere expressed dramatic, unbridled outrage, vowing that this would not stand. James Risen and Eric Lichtblau were awarded Pulitzer Prizes for exposing this serious lawbreaking. All sorts of Committees were formed, papers written, speeches given, conferences convened, and editorials published to denounce this extreme abuse of presidential power. This was illegality and corruption at the highest level of government, on the grandest scale, and of the most transparent strain.

And so, of course, the Congress retroactively legalized all of it today. To my mind, there are very few heroes here. Some Democrats were never upset about the Risen-Lichtblau revelations. They're not heroes. Some (see Rockefeller, Jay) pretended to be upset about the Risen-Lichtblau revelations, but then they changed their minds. They're not heroes. Others (see Reid, Harry) genuinely were angered, but took step after procedural step to make sure that the president got his way anyhow. They're not heroes either. Which leaves, essentially, a dozen people who consistently took their own side in this fight from the beginning. In other words, the fact that Democrats have are a small majority on Capitol Hill does not in any way imply that the Republicans ever have to put up much of a fight to get what they want vis-a-vis national security issues. FISA has been the toughest slog so far, and they still got 69 votes for cloture.

House leaders (admittedly less wobbly) are the next in line to cave. Bets on if they will?