HR6304 – Those Who Sacrifice Liberty

Back To Work?

The holiday is over and both the House of Representatives and the Senate are back at work. This week the Senate is scheduled to take up debate and vote on HR6304, The FISA Amendments Act. Regular readers will remember it from a weeklong rant appearing here at Wordout when the House introduced the bill one day and passed it the next.

Last October, Senator Obama promised he would do whatever it took to block any bill with the provisions of this one. Last October, Barack said he would even go as far as supporting a filibuster to block this bill. This June, he backed down, just like most of the Democrats in the House backed down (my Rep didn’t!).

How did it get this far, this fast? It was just this past spring that the Democrats were preaching loudly how they would never back down on this issue. What has happened to make the democrats fold up like a fern at night?

What’s Worse Than Recession?

The economy happened. The mortgage crisis took out one of the top players, wiping out hundreds of billions of invested dollars. The Fed pumped in a few hundred billion more dollars, trying to shore up the system. Around the world the same thing happened, is still happening. The mortgage crisis is spreading to become a general credit crisis, which means a finance crisis, which threatens the entire global economy.

Things are bad, and they will probably get a bit worse before they turn around.

The Bushies could care less. They’re on the way out, taking their profits with them. But that newly elected Democratic Congress is mostly intact this election, and they know that we have some hard times a’comin. So they made a ‘compromise‘ with the Bushies. They would give in to the neocon demands for no judicial oversight and retroactive immunity in exchange for some extra spending attached to a different bill.

What Was Compromised?

Remember last week the big hooplah about Bush signing a bill that gave veterans extended educational benefits, extended some unemployment benefits and things like that? You may have seen a sound-bite of Bushy himself taking credit for pushing the bill through.

Don’t be so gullible. Bush opposed that bill and threatened to veto it. The only reason that bill became law was the FISA deal. Congress traded our 4th amendment guarantees for a few million dollars in temporary funding. Later on this can be used to make them look like they care about us, once the economy goes to the deep south.

We can be sure, with the passage of HR6304, our Congress doesn’t care about us or the rule of law which used to make America so great. It was never our wealth. It was never our military might. It was never our ‘God-Given Place’ in the world. It was always our rule of law that made us great. We stood as a beacon throughout history, as a place where the law was above all else a guarantee at a chance for justice.

War On Terror or War On Tyranny?

For 7 long years that is what we have been defending. Our rule of law is what gave us our way of life. Is this the solution our government has come up with? Do we really have to choose between Terrorism or Tyranny? Are these really our only options?

This administration has consistently and aggressively attacked the very rule of law that made America great. At the end of their reign over us we find that they have consistently misused their power and authority for profit. Worse than that, they have changed us for the worse.

That our elected Congress, sworn to defend the Constitution, would debate and then pass a law which negates a vital part of that very Constitution, is an idea totally alien to me. But to see my nation sit and say nothing at all is appalling. Will we sit and do nothing while our freedoms are stripped from us?

Ben Franklin said this:

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.

The Senate has not passed this bill yet. Call your Senator. Send an email to your senator. Send an email to everyone you know, asking them to look into this for themselves. Do even a small bit of reading about it and you will almost certainly come to the same angry conclusion I did. There is no way this bill should ever become law.