FISA and the press

I think everybody who reads this site is pretty well aware that "something" is going to happen with FISA soon. I'm not sure what that will be. I may be on vacation when it happens. But I think it's fair to say that whatever emerges from the legislative process in the next week will in some ways serve as a test of the power of elite opinion. It's worth remembering that, when House Democrats decided not to speedily adopt the White House's preferred bill, they received baskets-full of favorable coverage from media big-wigs, newspaper editorial boards and bloggers across the country. They have had support within the mainstream. They have support from their base. They've benefited, in other words, from no shortage of positive reinforcement, and yet there's still, it seems, a significant possibility that telecom immunity will pass, and that FISA's surveillance provisions will become significantly more draconian than they already are. It's possible, then, that this whole episode will come to serve as an example of just how uninterested politicians are in elite (or public) opinion when elite (or public) opinion is at such odds with their own.

Or, perhaps, it will simply be evidence that those things become less important when the guiding principle of government has become to protect the government itself from paying for, or even acknowledging, its crimes.