Will Democrats Move On FISA Changes?

Democrats have decided that they have to support changes requested by the White House to the FISA law in order to protect vital national-security programs, the New York Times reports. They fear leaving themselves open to charges of being weak on terrorism as well as impeding vital signal intelligence efforts to keep the nation safe from another attack (via Memeorandum):

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. …
In the past few days, Mr. Bush and Mike McConnell, director of national intelligence, have publicly called on Congress to make the change before its August recess, which could begin this weekend. Democrats appear to be worried that if they block such legislation, the White House will depict them as being weak on terrorism.

The Bush administration didn’t just start calling for movement in the last few days. They agreed to place these efforts back under the supervision of the FISA court in January on the promise that the Democratic-controlled Congress would take action on these requests months ago. Instead, the Democratic leadership put them on the back burner while taking 108 days to authorize funding for the troops in Iraq and spending hundreds of hours on oversight hearings.
Now that the August recess approaches, the White House and the Directorate of National Intelligence wants some action. They have pressed Congress hard to take care of the nation’s business sometime in between hysterical committee hearings and strategizing for surrender in Iraq. Given that this has been sitting on their desks for seven months with no action at all, the impatience seems particularly justified, especially considering the recent news of a serious uptick in terrorist communications.
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.