UPDATE (Monday, 9 a.m.): The Washington Post this morning clarifies that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is not putting retroactive immunity on hold forever; he's just pushing back that debate by a couple months and may still cave to the White House. Senators Chris Dodd and Patrick Leahy remain vigorously opposed; hopefully they'll spend the next couple months laying out the case to their caucus and the majority leader.

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Some good news, despite the Wall Street Journal's claims to the contrary: it appears that the Congress will not grant blanket immunity to the telecom industry for allowing warrantless wiretapping by the government.

There's no reason for Congress to retroactively grant immunity to a powerful special interest like the telecommunications industry for what appears to be illegal activities.  The Bush administration is claiming that simultaneously (1) what they did isn't illegal, (2) they should be given legal immunity anyway, and (3) they can't tell us what they did because it's a national security issue.  It seems that they're trying to have it both ways.  Congress is wise to delay until this issue can be properly resolved, and questions of executive branch overreach and abuse of power are answered in the light of day.

More on this in my earlier post here.

Some welcome news: the top Democrat and Republican Senators on the Judiciary Committee are cooling to the idea of telecom amnesty.

This should absolutely not go through.  Granting blanket immunity to the telecoms for permitting warrantless wiretapping by the Bush administration would be doubly tragic: (1) it simply lets the telecoms off the hook for illegal activity, without any due process, a result that can only be seen as an affront to the law and to justice, and (2) it would eliminate the greatest point of leverage in investigating the extent, nature, and legality of the government's domestic spying program.  If the telecoms are preemptively off the hook, they have little to fear by blocking investigations into their actions and, by extension, those of the power-hungry executive branch.

We're not out of the woods yet, though.  Leahy and Specter are hesitating, but they're not drawing the line in the sand, though Sen. Chris Dodd did that last week.  Here's more from the two ranking Senators.

In the evolving fight to preserve the rule of law by not granting retroactive amnesty to the telecom companies who allowed warrantless wiretapping--i.e. domestic spying--on Americans, Sen. Chris Dodd has made a series of bold steps.

He first put a 'hold' on the bill, stopping it from reaching the Senate floor.

When the whispers began that Majority Leader Harry Reid might still bring the bill to the floor, Dodd announced that he would filibuster, and has been joined by several other Senators.  Thank goodness.

As I pointed out earlier, not only does the notion of amnesty for the telecoms have serious and troubling implications for the basic tenets of law and justice--and that if the telecoms are granted immunity, it's likely that we'll never be able to accurately determine whether and to what extent the Bush administration illegally spied on Americans--but it also ties directly back to the corrupting and overwhelming influence of powerful special interest money in politics.

Note how the Senator who forged this compromise received ten times more money from the telecoms this past year than in the five previous years combined.

Two simple takeaways, for me:

1. The telecoms should not receive retroactive immunity, especially when it's still unclear what they're receiving it for, i.e. whether what they did was legal, and what the specifics of the program were.

2. Whether or not his compliance was bought, the clear impression from that spike in campaign cash from the telecom industry to Rockefeller is that he's not an impartial legislator.  Until we create a system of full public financing for all races, especially for Congress, we will continue to live with the suspicion--if not the reality--that powerful special interests are buying favors and currying excessive influence with our lawmakers.  It is moments like this--when the apparent "best interests" of the people come into conflict with the wishes of major campaign donors--that highlight why having a political system awash in private money is such a bad idea for our democracy and why we must devote ourselves to changing it.

The Senate has apparently reached a deal that threatens any attempt to uncover the details of the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping of American citizens and whether those actions violated the law.

This is a sad and embarrassing trial and the Senate Intelligence Committee, led by chairman Sen. Jay Rockefeller, is essentially throwing the rule of law and the rigorous pursuit of justice under the bus--and it's not clear what is gained by doing so.  It's very clear what is lost.

When the Bush administration's intelligence agencies began domestic spying operations, the major telecom companies had to comply to make it work.  The White House, on the one hand, insists that it was legal; on the other hand, at the very same time, wants the telecom companies to receive retroactive immunity from any civil litigation--for allowing their customers' privacy to be violated by the federal government.

To recap, the White House is pushing two circles of logic here, and both are dangerous.  One is that the White House says that its wiretapping program was legal, but still wants telecoms to be granted immunity.  The other, which I covered earlier, is that the White House wants Congress to grant the telecoms immunity, but is preventing the telecoms from going before Congress to divulge what they did and what they'd deserve immunity from.

If we want a chance at justice with regard to the wiretapping program, letting the telecom companies retroactively off the hook may make that impossible, because then they'll never have to comply with any investigations.

It is unclear why the Senate would grant immunity to the telecoms while being kept in the dark about their activities in allowing domestic spying on American citizens.

Update: At least three of the top-10 contributors to Rockefeller are telecom industry giants. Sadly but not surprisingly, "American citizens who were unlawfully spied on" do not have a well-funded PAC, or maybe this would have turned out differently.