OK quick question.  What the hell is up with Democrats?  First Obama suddenly switches from the peace maker to the warmonger, and now the Democrats are rushing to pass expanded Wiretapping power?

Democrats Scrambling to Expand Eavesdropping

Well, well…the Democrats start changing tunes as election time draws closer….who woulda thunk it?

Under pressure from President Bush, Democratic leaders in Congress are scrambling to pass legislation this week to expand the government’s electronic wiretapping powers.

Democratic leaders have expressed a new willingness to work with the White House to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to make it easier for the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on some purely foreign telephone calls and e-mail. Such a step now requires court approval.

It would be the first change in the law since the Bush administration’s program of wiretapping without warrants became public in December 2005.

Captain Ed notes:

The ACLU and other groups oppose the change in FISA, but all it does is rectify a technical problem that keeps the NSA from its core mission of monitoring foreign communications. Thanks to globalization and the power of American technology, carriers in the US now handle traffic that neither originates or destinates in the US. Unfortunately, current law requires the NSA to get a search warrant for traffic that passes through American switches regardless of origin or destination — legislation crafted when American switches handled only American traffic. It will allow the NSA to operate more quickly to find and decode foreign traffic that passes through our systems, but not change the requirements for American traffic at all.

That seems like a very reasonable request, and one that should not take seven months to understand and process, especially in a time of war. It’s hard to connect dots when Congress won’t let the NSA find them.

That’s a well reasoned summary.

But still, as the Democrats led the complaints about Bush’s raping of the constitution and the NSA’s invasions of privacy, there is a sweet sense of irony here.

All I can say is I am starting to expect a lot of traditional positions to be modified in this election cycle.

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