Massachusetts Congressmen do the right thing while Congress hands Gonzales (yes, Gonzales) new surveillance powers

If we want to preserve what is left of our civil liberties, we may have to keep Congress in session year round. Not that the legislature is doing a good job preserving checks and balances – far from it! But all it appears to take is an impending recess and cranking up the politics of fear for the Executive branch to get its way.

And so in swift order, first the Senate (August 4) and then the House (August 5) endorsed the "Protect America Act of 2007" without any kind of Committee hearing, leaving the President to spend a few minutes on Sunday signing it into law. The only positive thing there is to say about this sorry performance is that not a single Massachusetts legislator went along with this enhancement of the government's warrantless NSA spying program. With the exception of Senator Kerry and Representative Delahunt who did not vote, all of our elected officials opposed it.

What a difference a few weeks can make! Attorney General Gonzales may have been on the hot seat last month, with perjury accusations about this very NSA spying program hanging over his head. But now he is in the driver's seat. The "compromise" insisted on by Democrats is that he doesn't get to oversee the program all on his own, but shares the responsibility with Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell.

Doesn't it make you feel much safer to know that this duo can command all telecommunications companies to hand over their records and permit the government to conduct wiretapping from their facilities? That your overseas emails and telephone conversations are there for the picking without any kind of court order? That it's up to that Great Communicator, the Attorney General, to report on what is being done to Congressional committees and the FISA court?

As legislators – including the 57 Democrats who sold out the Fourth Amendment -- chill out for the rest of the summer, they may be thinking it's no big deal. In six months they can re-visit it and throw a sop or two at constituents who care about civil liberties.

But will that happen? The last time Congress gave the President what he wanted so they could stampede out of town for the October recess, we got the Military Commissions Act of 2006. At a Senate hearing on the bill on September 25, 2006, protestors stood in T-shirts declaring "Torture is Un-American" and "Save Habeas Corpus," while retired rear admiral and top military lawyer John Hutson said of habeas corpus, "Without these kinds of protections, we're just another banana republic." An amendment which would have preserved habeas corpus lost by just a handful of votes.

Ten months later, with the Democrats "in control," we still don't have it back. A banana republic with National Security Agency technology is quite a scary beast. If it takes fear to motivate Congress, maybe each Member should be sent a DVD of the 1998 Hollywood film about the NSA, "Enemy of the State." That may be the only hope we have of getting some of our civil liberties back.

Nancy Murray
Director of Education
ACLU of Massachusetts