Atrios observes that perhaps we did lose the Cold War; the Senate is giving up our civil liberties with this retroactive immunity capitulation, and it's no longer clear what the victory over an autocratic centralized bureaucratic monstrosity meant when we centralize and wed our governance institutions to private companies that spy on us.
It's not over yet, of course.
I was at a roundtable with Speaker Pelosi a few weeks ago, and the first thing she said was how proud she was that the House had passed a FISA update without retroactive immunity in there. It looks like Reid has screwed the Constitution in the Senate, and will pass the worst bill possible on Monday.
I suppose it's up to Pelosi and her minions in the House. Having no sense of what conference committees look like, or how committed the House leadership is to avoiding retroactive immunity in the final bill, I suppose we'll have to wait.
There is of course a point to all this outrage, which is to change the decision-making process over the long-term. At some point, we will put enough people in positions of power so that the trend towards a Soviet style spying state will reverse itself. We're probably not far off, maybe a year or so.
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