The Washington Post Editorializes Today:

"Congress urgently needs to examine the full range of NSA domestic surveillance. These latest revelations show the error of well-meaning attempts to legislate concerning the NSA's wiretapping program by senators lacking a comprehensive sense of what it is and how it fits into the agency's larger domestic activities. The goal must be to modernize the rules of anti-terrorism surveillance within the United States, allowing for the uses of new technologies unimagined when Congress wrote current law but insisting on proper limits and systemic judicial and legislative oversight. This cannot begin to happen without a sustained congressional effort to find out what the NSA is doing."

In reality, that is what this is all about. No American could possibly NOT want our government to use every tool at their disposal to protect our country. At the root of the issues is the unbridled arrogance on the part of an Administration that seems to feel it has a broad mandate to ignore laws and our constitution in the name of expediancy. It is logical that our National Security apparatus has a need for secrecy. At the same time we have a system in place for necessary oversight to make sure that our civil liberties are not abused. The Bush administration has hypocritically used the excuse of leaks to justify broad abuses of powerm and yet the same administration has chosen the leak as a political tool when it meets their needs.

The American people WANT to trust their government. While a poll taken yesterday, indicates that the American people are willing to support data collection efforts like the phone records collection, if it indeed helps to protect the U.S. from terror attacks, Americans are concerned about the errossion of our civil liberties under this administration. The bottom line is that Congress has been derlict in its duties to the constitution and the balance of power, instead rubber stamping the initiatives of this administration and ignoring their oversight responsibilities.

We have a constitution for a reason, and secretly suspending it, without oversight or debate is not something the American people will support. While yesterday's news may not have had the impact on the American people that progressives expected, the long term corrossive effect on our civil liberties and the arrogance of this administration in feeling that they are somehow above the law, will likely have an impact in November.

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