Today, the House of Representatives took a significant step backward in defending our country against terrorism and passed a partisan bill that will please class-action trial lawyers at the expense of our national security. Their bill would make it easier for class-action trial lawyers to sue companies whose only "offense" is that they are alleged to have assisted in efforts to protect the country after the attacks of September 11. These companies already face multibillion-dollar lawsuits, but even the status quo – which our intelligence professionals have said is undermining our ability to get cooperation from the private sector – is better than the alternative proposed in the House bill, which would preserve these lawsuits and give trial lawyers more weapons to attack companies for doing their patriotic service. The good news is that the House bill will be dead on arrival in the Senate and, in any event, would be vetoed by the President if it ever got to his desk.
The House bill is not a serious effort to move the legislative process forward, nor is it a serious effort to protect our national security. It is a partisan bill designed to give the House Democratic leadership cover for their failure to act responsibly and vote on the bipartisan Senate bill. The President trusts that Senate leaders, who have acted in a far more bipartisan and responsible way than their colleagues in the House, will see the House bill for the political ploy that it is, reject it, and send back to the House the strong bill the Senate has already passed.
There is a lapse of logic in this statement big enough to drive a Mack Truck through. "Their bill would make it easier for class-action trial lawyers to sue companies whose only "offense" is that they are alleged to have assisted in efforts to protect the country after the attacks of September 11. These companies already face multibillion-dollar lawsuits, but even the status quo – which our intelligence professionals have said is undermining our ability to get cooperation from the private sector – is better than the alternative proposed in the House bill, which would preserve these lawsuits and give trial lawyers more weapons to attack companies for doing their patriotic service." Patriotic Sevice is defined here as going along with the Bush Administration’s entreaties to ignore the laws of the United States of America – laws they knew quite well. And then Fratto goes further, "intelligence professionals have said is undermining our ability to get cooperation from the private sector." Who is the "our" in "our ability to get cooperation from the private sector." Fratto’s logic only makes sense if you accept the premise that oversight on the gathering of intelligence is interfering with anything. There is no evidence that oversight has slowed anything down, and plenty of evidence that its absence lead to immediate abuse of the system – the F.B.I., the C.I.A., N.S.A., etc. This is only a philosophical point, a point that Bush and Cheney brought to the White House and put into practice without telling anyone. They contend that their actions are, by definition, okay. No one needs to review anything they do. And they claim that opposing their intrinsic rightness is "at the expense of our national security." Based on what? Their track records? They are notorious liars, manipulators of information. They are reflexly contemptuous of Congress. And they are both regularly wrong – incompetent to a fault by any parameter. I, for one, am proud of the House of Representatives for holding their ground. Frankly, I don’t really want to hold the telecoms responsible for breaking the law. I want Bush and Cheney to be held responsible. If enough class action suits get filed, maybe the telecoms will help us place the blame where it actually belongs…
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