Political Face-off Continues Over Spy Bill

Feb. 15, 2008 — -- The fingerpointing between President George W. Bush and House Democrats over soon-to-expire legislation governing electronic surveillance continued Friday, with the president accusing Democrats of putting the American people at risk by heading off for a 12-day recess without resolving the matter, and Democrats accusing the president and his allies of fearmongering.

The legislation is now on course to expire at midnight Saturday night.

The Senate has already passed a measure that would not only extend the surveillance law but also update it by offering retroactive immunity from lawsuits to telecommunications companies who cooperate with the government. But House Democrats have been unwilling to go with that version of the bill.

The president has been urging the House to pass the Senate version, rather than a version without the retroactive liability immunity — indeed, the president has threatened to veto any extension of the law that does not include such a measure, which he argues is critical to ensuring the program's future success.

"By blocking this piece of legislation, our country is more in danger of an attack," Bush said Friday, in his third statement in as many days on the matter. "Intelligence officials won't have the tools necessary to get as much information as we possibly can to protect you."

Republican Congressional leaders were more blunt, accusing Democrats of serving the interests of trial lawyers over that of the American people.

"Clearly the majority of Democrats in the House would rather see companies in court than terrorists in jail," said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, after a meeting with the president.

Democrats counter that it is the president and Congressional Republicans who are playing politics. And they say Republicans are being disingenuous about the actual risks involved in letting the law expire. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-CA, argued that if Republicans truly believed that allowing the current law to expire would create dangerous gaps in intelligence, they would have agreed to another temporary extension of that law, while negotiators tried to work out their differences.

Earlier this week, Republicans in the House blocked a Democratic effort to temporarily extend the current law.

"If [the president] did not want the [Protect America Act] to expire this weekend, he should have supported an extension of it, as the overwhelming majority of House Democrats did on Wednesday," Pelosi said in a statement on Friday.

Expiration of the law will not mean an immediate end to wiretapping. Existing surveillance — under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA — could continue for one year. Any new surveillance the government seeks could be granted by the underlying FISA rules, which may require warrants from FISA's secret court, a panel of seven federal district judges appointed by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. The court hears classified requests for authorization of electronic surveillance aimed at obtaining foreign intelligence information.