The Wall Street Journal-20080129-Wiretrapped

Return to: The_Wall_Street_Journal-20080129

Wiretrapped

Full Text (366  words)

Senate Democrats yesterday marshaled enough votes to block a permanent fix for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. They then failed to muster enough support for a 30-day extension of the bill passed last summer, which provides a Congressional imprimatur for the warrantless wiretapping of foreign terrorists. That bill, the Protect America Act, expires Friday.

Hillary Clinton said before the vote that the bill was too important to "shortchange debate" on it, even though Friday's deadline has been on the calendar since Congress passed the six-month patch last August. We suspect what she really means is that the issue is too important for her to take a clear stand on ahead of the next primaries.

As President both Mrs. Clinton and rival Barack Obama would surely want the ability to spy on our enemies overseas. They are both smart enough to know, too, that much foreign communications pass through the U.S. owing to the nature of global electronic communications networks, a fact that FISA, written in 1978, takes no account of.

It strains credibility to believe, as Majority Leader Harry Reid claims, that the Senate needs another month to do what it couldn't in the past six. But Mr. Reid and his fellow Democrats are under intense pressure from the far left to deny Mr. Bush this authority. The tort bar, meanwhile, wants to preserve its ability to sue telephone companies for assisting the program in the days after 9/11.

The junior Senator from New York, in a statement that can only be called Clintonian, said before the vote that the bill was "important legislation that would modernize our surveillance laws and give our nation's intelligence professionals the tools they need to fight terrorism and make our country more secure." But she voted against cloture anyway, along with all but three of her Democratic colleagues.

If she and Mr. Reid want a debate, then by all means, let's have it. Let's debate right up to November whether judges should have to give their approval before our spooks can listen in on al Qaeda. Then maybe the American people can decide if holding our war-fighting capability hostage to the left and the tort bar makes them feel safer.