It was December 2005 when The New York Times revealed that President George W. Bush “secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying.” The report also noted: “Some officials familiar with it say they consider warrantless eavesdropping inside the United States to be unlawful and possibly unconstitutional.”

Democrats, who did not yet control Congress, immediately called for an investigation. Sen. Russ Feingold, among others, said Bush was “putting himself above the law.”

No reforms curbing the administration’s practices had been enacted by the time Democrats took over Congress in 2007. Suddenly, they were in a position to scotch the rogue program. They could have taken care of any legal ambiguity and explicitly banned warrantless wiretapping. They could have passed budgets that withheld NSA funding. They could have blocked Bush’s 2007 nominee for director of national intelligence.  They could have threatened to shut the whole government down.

They didn’t do any of it.

What Democratic leaders did was cooperate with the Bush administration to pass legislation in 2007 and 2008 that effectively legalized the program.

The 2007 version had a six-month sunset provision to allow for further negotiation. The vast majority of Democrats voted against it, including Sen. Barack Obama. But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid allowed it to reach the House and Senate floors and receive and up-or-down vote. Democrats were able to tweak the 2008 version, attracting the support of nearly half of the Democratic caucus. But Bush administration officials largely got what they wanted.

And in what was seen by many progressive activists as the biggest failure, Democrats failed to strip the bill of a provision granting legal immunity to telecommunications companies that complied with Bush’s warrantless wiretapping requests. If the amendment had succeeded, such legislation would have essentially made what happened before 2007 illegal and enforceable. Instead, the new law wiped the slate clean.

Read more: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2014/12/01/how_democrats_handled_a_law-breaking_president_124799.html#ixzz3KebcL5g3
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